Subject: Re: Porting to another OS?
From: Thomas Fletcher (thomasf@qnx.com)
Date: Mon Apr 23 2001 - 15:28:07 CDT
On Mon, 23 Apr 2001, David Given wrote:
> I am vaguely interested in doing an Abiword port to another operating system.
> What's involved in this? I've had a brief look at the GTK code, and it seems to
> consist of a bunch of classes, one per dialogue box, plus one for the main
> application. What's the minimum you have to do to get *something*, no matter
> how useless, running?
Hmm ... are you going to get us running under TAO =;-)
I've done the port a couple of times and it can actually
be "whipped" up in an evening or two to the point where
something is on-screen and visible. The biggest issue
will be how much your system looks like other systems for
the more standard API stuff. Both BeOS and QNX work close
enough to general Unix systems that I was able to write a
sed script that initially did a copy to the new platform
directory and s/Unix/QNX/ s/UNIX/QNX/ s/unix/qnx/ to do
a large amount of manual labour. Then I went crazy
#if 0'ing out large amounts of the function bodies.
The first thing to do (after getting your build environement
recognized and putting the right directories in place) is to
start walking the App and Frame classes to get the layout code
in place. Very soon you will be forced to write at least a
basic stub of the graphics class so that you can actually
see something.
Shortly after this you should be able to compile and get
something up and running and then start working piecewise
on things like input, menus, rulers etc.
If you search through the mailing list archives you will
see that I posted a rough outline of the process a while
ago.
Thomas
-------------------------------------------------------------
Thomas (toe-mah) Fletcher QNX Software Systems
thomasf@qnx.com Neutrino Development Group
(613)-591-0931 http://www.qnx.com/~thomasf
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