Subject: POW (2000/02/23) - AbiWord, BeOS, and the PowerPC!
sterwill@abisource.com
Date: Wed Feb 23 2000 - 19:52:38 CST
It's time for another Project of the Week (POW)!
This week's project is a little more specialized than POWs from the
past. AbiSource has a collection of machines, each running a
different operating system on a variety of system architectures.
These machines not only prepare official binary releases but serve
as Tinderbox clients. See them live at <http://www.abisource.com/tinderbox>.
If you check out that URL, you'll see that one of the columns is
red, and its column heading cell background is flame. That's because
this section of the tree is on fire. Click on the "L" in the most recent
(topmost) cell in that column, and you'll learn more about that
build.
Follow the "Show Full Log" link, and you'll be treated to a detailed
report of the compilation on that platform.
The goal of this week's project is to make the BeOS PPC column green
(fix the AbiWord build for this platform).
If you have a PowerPC machine (PowerMac or one of the clones Apple
allowed a few years back), and have BeOS installed, and know enough C
to start poking around, give this one a shot. Our build host is the
slowest machine in the building, which makes manual compilation
very hard indeed. We also don't have anyone intimately familiar with
BeOS's compiler on the PPC platform (from Metrowerks). I don't know why
mwcc has typing conflicts, and I'm hoping someone more familiar with
that platform can offer a few fixes.
Our build host ("mac") is running BeOS 4.52. AbiWord last built
with BeOS 4.0, but we've added a dependency on libiconv for the
spell-checker (as noted in the download instructions). You'll see by
scrolling through the build logs that the compilation fails in the
spell-checking code. This code works on other platforms, include BeOS
Intel (using the GNU C compiler), and Linux on the PowerPC.
To get started, visit the AbiSource developer pages and grab
a copy of the source code via CVS. This information can be found at
<http://www.abisource.com/dev_download.phtml#cvs>. On your Be box,
type "make" and see what happens. Compile/debug/fix, repeat.
Good luck!
PS: For more background on the whole POW / ZAP / SHAZAM concept, see the
following introduction:
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/99/September/0097.html
-- Shaw Terwilliger
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