RE: [Evolution] evolution on windows

[Not Zed <notzed ximian com>]

On Wed, 2004-11-17 at 09:02 +0100, Lehmann, Eckhard {TR-I~Penzberg} wrote:
> > Since Evo is a GNOME app, not a GTK app, you'd need, I think, 
> > all of the GNOME libs ported to MSWin.
>
> Yes. porting the GNOME libs to windows is much work and in some cases
> might be not easy, probably.
>
> But would it be possible to remove GNOME dependencies and substitute the
> components in question by things that are available on Windows, either
> through the Windows API or other porting projects? Or are there to many
> dependencies on GNOME and it would not be possible to do the evolution
> port without the GNOME libs port?
I'm not sure I entirely agree with Jeff's sentiments, although it would make things painful.

It would be a major undertaking.  Particularly if you wanted a more native feel to it, it would essentially be a total rewrite.  If you just ran it under an X server it would just be a lot of work.

Most of the nasty bulky code is either: 
 - very posix i/o specific, filesystem semantics specific too.
 - posix thread specific
 - fairly X specific (selections, drag and drop, i don't know how well gtk+ maps to windows maybe it makes it easy)

Although its been so long since I did anything on windows I have no idea what services are available now.

Miguel has the wild idea that we're all going to throw all the code away and rewrite it in c# anyway, providing a cross-platform port 'for free'.  We could have done that for 2.0 perhaps, but mono was definitely too green then (as far as i can tell), so we didn't.  The idea excites me like a kick to the head really.

--

Michael Zucchi <notzed ximian com> "Free Software, putting the Free back in Free Market." Novell's Evolution and Free Software Developer