[MERGE] Make typing 'bzr' under win98 do something useful

[Martin]

On 20/06/07, Alexander Belchenko <bialix at ukr.net> wrote:
> It's a known problem since 2005.

Right, this is the core point really, rather than waiting more years
for a big patch that corrects, works around, or just notifies of all
the unixy assumptions in the code, I think it's better to add a short,
prominent note now. Then when/if the big patch is ready, it's not hard
to chop those couple of lines back out at the same time.

> As I can see, it should be big patch, that affects many part of bzrlib.
> And from this point of view I think adding info to wiki is simpler solution.

I think there needs to be something in the program itself, given the
frequency and extreme crypticisty of the errors despite perfectly
clean install. This doesn't mean that better docs on the web wouldn't
be a good thing. Clearly you have some idea about ways in which you
can perhaps use bzr on 98, something my poking around for a couple of
hours the other day didn't work out.

> P.S. I finished my work on proper win98 support just before dirstate was
> introduced. So, we (bzr team/project) *never* has bzr release with proper
> support of win98. Before 0.15 release there is problems with control
> directories on win98. When I fix those issues, in 0.15 we have dirstates.
> And win98 again becomes unsupported platform. And this fact upsets me a lot.

I sympathise. Hey, even modern windows isn't properly supported.

Martin