Is there a community product maintaining Windows support?

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

I just became a maintainer on the apcupsd project.

I don't know if bind for windows is built like apcupsd is, by using 
mingw32 but unfortunately there's problems with the mingw32 project 
these days, it's gone through a lot of transitions.

Getting a working build environment for apcupsd at least, requires
using pretty old versions of mingw.

No doubt I'm going to be jumped on for saying so but I know for
apcupsd I've got a -lot- of work to do to get it up to speed.

There are some people out there who have built their own mingw32/mingw64
binaries that are separate from the ones "officially" distributed which
might be an avenue.  My guess the ISC developer who was spearheading
this port moved on to other things and ISC can't find someone who
wants to get involved in this and I can understand why.

There is an interesting article on this problem here:

https://increment.com/open-source/the-rise-of-few-maintainer-projects/

I would ask you this Jakob - would you trust a windows binary of
bind that you compiled?

I've got years of history participating on the apcupsd project.  When
I start submitting changes to it, the users of it have that trust 
automatically from that history.  They won't worry if they download a
binary from sourceforge that I built that it's going to gun their 
system.  I'm a public figure in OSS besides that - people may like me
or think I'm an asshole - but they know I'm a real person who has a
rep. to maintain.  I've got a business, federal and state tax ID's,
a published phone number, multiple domain names I've owned for years.  I 
can't run and hide.

You can probably review the bind mailing list and dig out less than
100 names of people who have been on it, regularly posting, for the last
decade.

If none of those people step up to create a fork - then the windows port 
  is effectively going to be dead I'm afraid.  Nobody is going to trust 
"some dude" with zero history who sets up on github and forks bind and 
posts a windows binary for downloading just because he says it's gold.
Would you?  Trust a production system to that?

OSS got it's start by making the CODE available, NOT BINARIES.  Users
like you were expected to be completely happy with the fact that the 
code was even there at all and it compiled.   You do your own building.
Not knowing how to run a compiler is no excuse.  The Internet has tons
of tutorials on it.

You want a bind for windows - build it yourself.  That's the can-do 
attitude that OSS started with.  I remember the first time I ever 
downloaded an real OSS code and built it myself.  It was rzsz - zmodem
code for windows.  Back in the BBS days, really.  That's the only way
you got that binary.  It was a total gas and I was hooked.  Don't deny
yourself the same pleasure.

Ted


On 2/11/2022 8:24 AM, Jakob Bohm via bind-users wrote:
> As ISC has apparently announced that it will no longer maintain the code 
> for running bind on Windows operating systems, and that this is now up 
> to the community, is there a community group that has stepped up to the 
> task?
> 
> 
> Enjoy
> 
> Jakob