OpenVMS support

[Colin Blake <colin theblakes com>]

First let me introduce myself. My name is Colin Blake and I work in
OpenVMS Engineering at Compaq. For the past year or so I have been
porting the Mozilla code and all of its prerequisites to OpenVMS. I
originally ported GLib and GTK+ 1.2.0 as part of this effort, but just
recently I have ported the 1.2.7 code. I would really like to get these
changes back into the GTK source base, so that I won't have to keep
applying my changes to future versions. And OpenVMS customers would
really like to get their hands on this code too. That's what this
posting is all about.

GTK builds under native OpenVMS (this means it doesn't use configure and
gmake). This is by far the easiest way for OpenVMS users to build GTK
since autoconf isn't available on OpenVMS. But the down side is that a
separate set of build files are required for OpenVMS. So, where am I
going with this? Well, I would like to propose a two phase checkin for
OpenVMS.

Phase 1 will be to check in the CODE changes for OpenVMS and could occur
immediately. This will get OpenVMS into the source tree, and will
prevent me from have to keep "catching up" with each new release of GTK.
But it will not build with the usual configure/gmake. Instead there will
be a separate set of OpenVMS build files for building on OpenVMS, which
could either be checked in to the GTK tree or just available as a
separate download file (from gtk website or OpenVMS website).

Phase 2 will be to get GTK to build on OpenVMS using the standard (but
modified) GTK build procedure. This will not occur for at least several
months (other people in OpenVMS are working on a GNU environment for
OpenVMS that will support things like autoconf; that will make building
GTK on OpenVMS a LOT easier).

So, phase 2 is the ultimate goal, but phase 1 will get the OpenVMS code
changes into the source tree and available to the world.

How does this sound, in principle? Is the idea of a separate "build kit"
for OpenVMS too repulsive? At least it keeps the OpenVMS-specific build
stuff out of the GTK+ source tree.

In followup postings I will post the diffs for the code changes I had to
make. I'd appreciate it if some people could review these changes and
give me feedback on what I need to do in order to get these changes into
the GTK source tree.

Best regards,

Colin Blake
OpenVMS
Compaq.