Fri, 11 May 2007 (13:31 +0200 UTC) Vincent Lefevre wrote:
On 2007-05-11 05:19:46 -0400, Randall Wood wrote:
On 11 May 2007, at 02:48, Keith J. Schultz wrote:
Am I missing something here? Would not a port come from the linux side and thereby x11? I mean are ports basically unix? Yes, I know of the aqua branch of ports.
Mac OS X is basically unix. However, given all the minor differences between unix versions and linux versions, it is pretty much impossible to build a complex application that really does not care what variant of unix its running on. [...]
Does the X11 version run on Linux only? Or does it run on Solaris and FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD as well? In the latter case, isn't there a good chance to make it work on Mac OS X (Darwin) + X11 too without many changes? Or does Mac OS X have too many specificities not common to some other supported OS?
Also, Firefox/Gecko uses GTK+ under X11. Hasn't most of the hard work been done by porting GTK+?
-- Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@vinc17.org> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.org/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arenaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
The last version of the Mozilla software that compiles and runs without extra effort under OS X/X11 was end-of-the-line 1.7.13. To get it running easily, supporting printing and anti-aliased fonts, I had to install X-org over the top of Apple's X11. I did not use the old Darwinports. When I tried to move on to SeaMonkey, I found that I could compile it and run it, browse and most everything until I needed to open a dialog box in preferences or for file upload/download. At that point the program stops responding. It does not crash, at first, it just refuses to do anything until some internal timeout. Later it may crash with a wild branch, so it is not possible to track exactly where the error is. Still, I believe I understand the issue. During the build configured for the GTK2 engine, the process finds what it needs for GTK2/GDK and the VFS parts. But deep inside the code the developers wrote, they have overridden the code for GTK and added a step requiring the "Aqua" frameworks. The program that results appears to call one set of file-access widgets with the parameters for another. I gave up trying to figure it out because I doubted I could fix it even if I did find which libraries were needed that were not being linked and where the code was that munged the configuration to force an Aqua build. But someone who understands autoconf and automake could probably fix the problem pretty easily. I suspect a post configure patch could disable all the Aqua stuff. That would give the port developer a broken compile (probably), but the errors should point to where the make needs to be altered to create an OS X/GTK build. By the way, I have never figured out how to get Java to run in the OS X/X111 Mozilla 1.7.13. A number of my work sights now require Java, so I have stopped relying on the X11 version. -- Dr. Robert Delius Royar Associate Professor of English Morehead State University Morehead, Kentucky