Windows support

[DeeJay]

Nearly a year ago, 4th Dec 2007 to be precise, I had reason to
write to this list

"Overall, it still seems to me that Windows is a bit of a second-class
citizen: for instance, much of the documentation does not acknowledge
Windows, and we seem to be reliant on one volunteer [to whom many
thanks] for packaging the Windows installer. And if I encounter a problem
I don't want to be told to use another OS! Do the core Bazaar developers,
testers, documentors and maintainers have access to a Windows system
to reinforce their efforts? If not, should they have?"

This was acknowledged, positively, by Ian Clatworthy.

Have things changed much in the last year?

I accept that if Bzr is OS-neutral then Windows doesn't
need to be specifically acknowledged.

I am pleased to see case-sensitivity on Windows being discussed
again.

But there seems to be no reliable release mechanism for Windows
.exe installers. [As of the time of writing there is no installer for
Bazaar 1.8, which is now nearly 2 weeks old.] And the availability
of installers for RC releases is unpredictable. If we can't install
RC code, how can we give you feedback on its quality?

If the online Survey is to be believed Windows users are
predominant in the Bzr user community, so it seems odd
that the core team don't appear to have the ability to build
and test releases for that platform?

As specific observations that might be addressed:
See the page http://bazaar-vcs.org/WindowsDownloads.
If you follow the instructions in the first block of text to
"Choose the most recent bzr-setup-*.exe from the download page"
at the time of writing this will get an RC release that has since been
corrected and superceded by a full point release - albeit not as a .exe

And in the next block of text, about python-based installers,
the similar advice to
"Choose the most recent bzr-setup-*.exe from the download page"
is downright wrong, since the python-based installers don't have
'setup' in their names!

DJ
Leicester, UK