It's time for another Project of the Week (POW)! This week's project is a little more specialized than POWs from the past. AbiSource has a collection of machines, each running a different operating system on a variety of system architectures. These machines not only prepare official binary releases but serve as Tinderbox clients. See them live at <http://www.abisource.com/tinderbox>. If you check out that URL, you'll see that one of the columns is red, and its column heading cell background is flame. That's because this section of the tree is on fire. Click on the "L" in the most recent (topmost) cell in that column, and you'll learn more about that build. Follow the "Show Full Log" link, and you'll be treated to a detailed report of the compilation on that platform. The goal of this week's project is to make the BeOS PPC column green (fix the AbiWord build for this platform). If you have a PowerPC machine (PowerMac or one of the clones Apple allowed a few years back), and have BeOS installed, and know enough C to start poking around, give this one a shot. Our build host is the slowest machine in the building, which makes manual compilation very hard indeed. We also don't have anyone intimately familiar with BeOS's compiler on the PPC platform (from Metrowerks). I don't know why mwcc has typing conflicts, and I'm hoping someone more familiar with that platform can offer a few fixes. Our build host ("mac") is running BeOS 4.52. AbiWord last built with BeOS 4.0, but we've added a dependency on libiconv for the spell-checker (as noted in the download instructions). You'll see by scrolling through the build logs that the compilation fails in the spell-checking code. This code works on other platforms, include BeOS Intel (using the GNU C compiler), and Linux on the PowerPC. To get started, visit the AbiSource developer pages and grab a copy of the source code via CVS. This information can be found at <http://www.abisource.com/dev_download.phtml#cvs>. On your Be box, type "make" and see what happens. Compile/debug/fix, repeat. Good luck! PS: For more background on the whole POW / ZAP / SHAZAM concept, see the following introduction: http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/99/September/0097.html -- Shaw Terwilliger
