Address Windows Incompatibilities

[thclark]

Overview

Octue's mission is to make life easy for scientists and engineers who deal with data.

As part of that, we're doing our level best to support and work toward full feature compatibility on Windows systems. We have a couple of customers with occasional Windows requirements and so their support is partially driving this.

However, it's our experience that a lot of things that are simple on Unix (particularly surrounding scripting, python environment management and test / CI) can be extremely hard on Windows and even WSL... but we're only a small team.

I've long been adamant that this full compatibility should be the target, but we've reached the point where features are being delayed for weeks, and it's costing us thousands of pounds to tease Windows test suites to run when unix based ones are passing effortlessly.

We can't afford that kind of effort without significant commitment from customers using Windows, so I've reluctantly taken the decision to allow Windows compatibility to slip behind Unix.

How you can help

You can see our website's "get involved" for a general list of ways to help the cause! If you're specifically interested in helping with this issue, there are a few things we need:

1. Weigh in. If you're using Octue on windows and there's a problem, file a bug report and even if we can't help for now, we'll keep track of the issue and make sure it gets solved eventually. Please be as detailed as you can about your system setup in your bug report.

2. Volunteer! We need volunteers with Windows, WSL and PowerShell experience to help get the test suites running correctly and covering usage in both the Windows and WSL environments. Even if you can only do a bit and not maintain for a long time, a few fixes are appreciated. Reply in this issue.

3. Partnership. If you're wanting to use Octue within your institution, partner with us to help get you started and if Windows is one of your requirements, we'll naturally make sure it's brought up to 💯 % as part of our deliverables and quality control process.

4. Sponsorship. Be it financial donation or developer time, your contributions are incredibly valuable. Make sure to get in touch and let us know you'd like your contributions to go toward work on this particular area.

In the meantime

Here's the list of areas in which we've skipped tests, sacrificed quality or just can't make something work:

• https://github.com/octue/octue-sdk-python/blob/main/tests/templates/test_template_apps.py#L83 - this is suddenly failing as seen here