Re: Porting GTK, requirements

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

"listreader joost cx" <listreader joost cx> writes:

> Hello all,
> 
> I was wondering if anybody could list the requirements for a full GTK port
> to another operating system. Does a complete posix system need to be in
> place ? Does it require a certain directory structure ? Is there a list of
> successful GTK ports to non-unix systems ? Are there any such initiatives
> in progress ? What about framebuffer/input requirements ?

The relevant pieces of the picture are:

 A) The operating system environment ... libraries etc.
    Porting GLib deals with differences here.
 B) The font system in use (X11, FreeType, Win32, etc.)...
    This involves Pango.
 C) The windowing system in use (X11, Win32, framebuffer, etc.)

There are few hard requirements in what is required to port GTK+
to another system; Win32 and Unix/X11 are pretty radically different
so we can abstract over a lot. But the flip side of that is that
there is no fixed porting procedure, and every port is essentially
a custom job and (depending on the system) could involve 
a great deal of work.

The main currently maintained port to a non-unix system operating
system environment I'm aware of is the Win32 port. Portions of the 
GTK+ library stack have been ported to QNX. In the past, there were 
also ports to OS/2 (using X11) and BeOS, but those haven't been 
maintained.

There are two sets of framebuffer code ... the linux-fb code
in in the GTK+ distribution and the directfb port of GTK+
(http://www.directfb.org) Both are linux specific; the linux-fb
code is probably easier to port to a different
keyboard/pointer/framebuffer API because it is much simpler
and more self contained.

Regards,
                                        Owen