Subject: Re: Porting to another OS?
From: David Given (dg@tao-group.com)
Date: Tue Apr 24 2001 - 06:07:46 CDT
[...]
> Hmm ... are you going to get us running under TAO =;-)
Thinking about it. Purely speculative at this point.
> 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.
Well, we mostly look like a Unix. Major differences are: we don't do fork(),
and because of this, we don't really have a sh. (Our shell looks and works quite
differently.) There is a third-party port of ash, but it doesn't work very well.
The main difference between our shell and sh is that our shell uses {} instead
of "" for quoting ("" causes an error). The native gui, called the AVE, is your
standard event-loop based system and is well-supported in C.
What sort of font metric information does Abiword need? I gather that the
standard X metrics aren't sufficient, which is why it needs the .afm files.
I've just done some brief fiddling, and it seems that the build mechanism
doesn't want to work with either our shell or ash. This means that a new one
for intent would need to be written --- it just a matter of compiling everything
in all the xp/ and intent/ directories together in af/, wp/ and text/, or is it
more complicated than that?
[...]
> If you search through the mailing list archives you will
> see that I posted a rough outline of the process a while
> ago.
I'll have a look.
-- +- David Given --------McQ-+ "I concluded from the beginning that this would be | Work: dg@tao-group.com | the end; and I am right, for it is not half over | Play: dg@cowlark.com | yet." --- Sir Boyle Roche +- http://www.cowlark.com -+
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Tue Apr 24 2001 - 06:07:52 CDT