Reflactions about porting evince to the Microsoft Windows platform

[Patrick Ohnewein <patrick ohnewein lugbz org>]

Hello,

I had a short talk to nsh on #evince. He was so kind to explain me a
little about the actual situation in the evince project.

For what I can see there is no ongoing project to port evince to the
win32 platform.

Porting a gnome app to win32 means porting all libs used by the app.
That can lead to the work to port the whole gnome environment. An
example of a big porting project is the evolution port.

A possibility could be to port just the evince-gtk version. But that
would not be a distribution supported by the main dev team, being it to
different from the mainstream version.

Why am I looking for a evince port?

I am involved in a project, where PDF content will be distributed on a
CD containing Free Software for the Microsoft Windows platform. We would
like to include only Free Software no Freeware nor Shareware. At the
moment it seams there is no real alternative to the Acrobat Reader.
There is a xpdf port, but that's no real option for the target.

I contacted Marco, a local developer who has some experience in porting
gtk apps to win32. He took a short look to it today and reported me,
that he wasn't able to compile evince on win32 using the cygwin
environment and he suspects there is a lot of work to do.

So my request to the evince team. Would you support a porting project of
evince to win32 and could someone of you give us an esimation of the
work needed to do this?

Best regards and a happy new year, full of wonderfull hacking!
Patrick