Subject: Re: Framebuffer port, again!
From: Matthew Kirkwood (weejock@ferret.lmh.ox.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Mar 23 2000 - 11:15:05 CST
On Thu, 23 Mar 2000, Paul Rohr wrote:
> >> framebuffer <--> GDK <--> GTK <--> AbiWord, etc.
> >
> >You're missing a layer there. GDK expects to run on top of
> >a windowing system, not a graphics library. You need it to
> >provide the usual GUI things like multiple overlapping
> >windows and event management.
> The general point still holds though, right? All of those services
> need to be provided in some layer between the framebuffer and AbiWord,
> so a more accurate comparison would be:
>
> framebuffer <--> glue1 <--> GDK <--> GTK <--> AbiWord
> framebuffer <--> glue2 <--> AbiWord
>
> The practical question is how much work implementing glue1 saves you
> relative to implementing all of glue2.
glue1 is pretty much done, in a few guises. Microwindows
offers you multiple routes, many of which let you leverage
a lot of existing code.
The two which make most sense to me are:
framebuffer <--> microwindows' win32 API <--> AbiWord for Win32
framebuffer <--> microwindows' X-alike API <-->
<--> GDK <--> GTK <--> AbiWord for GTK
The X-like API of microwin is, I gather, rather less mature
than the Win32 one (especially regarding window management),
so there could be some value in:
framebuffer <--> microwin / Win32 <--> GDK/GTK (Win32)
<--> AbiWord for GTK
I think that there's a lot to be said for some of the more
demented combinations, too:
Win32 <--> GDK <--> GTK <--> Abiword / GTK
X <--> winelib <--> AbiWord / Win32
X <--> winelib <--> GDK/GTK (Win32) <--> Abi / GTK
I believe that there is some work ongoing to port winelib
to dumb-framebuffer systems. So the last two could be
less silly than they might seem initially.
> There's quite a large gap to cover between ...
>
> ... what AbiWord expects (services provided by a modern GUI)
> ... what a raw framebuffer provides (almost nothing)
>
> I certainly didn't mean to trivialize what it takes to get GDK running
> on a framebuffer, but I do *hope* it'd save you at least some work
> somewhere that GTK does for you. :-)
<cop-out>
I'm happy enough with X that it won't save me any work at all :-)
</cop-out>
The unifying feature of all of the useful ports (ie. the ones
which introduce support for new platforms) listed above is, as
I see it:
* the (IMO) most useful way to implement them would involve
no changes to Abiword beyond portability improvements and
Makefile alterations
The other factor is that:
* none of the suggestions above has less than one very-much-
alpha component
Matthew.
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