Jim Elliott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Just out of curiousity, how much effort is generally involved
in "porting" an application such as this to z? Is it just a
matter of building it from source on z and making sure
everything works? (Not that even that is in any way a small
efford.) Or are there generally code changes required as well?
Frank:
Generally any application which runs on Linux on x86 will compile
and run on Linux on z (or Linux on POWER) with few or no changes.
The exceptions are those with hardware dependencies (these are
often seen in "systems management" type of software which gets
down into the kernel). The real effort in any port is in two
areas:
1) The installation tools (you would be amazed at how many Linux
apps, even server apps, are dependent on a GUI install!)
Would you believe this? If I plug a USB disk, or a CD or DVD, into my
laptop which is now running Fedora Core 5, that the _only_ visible
response is a psuedo-windows GUI pop-up asking what to do with it? Eeven
if I;m running on a text console (of which I have a dozen)?
No mount-points in /media. I recently bought some CDs and spent some
time copying them for use in my car, and it was quite painful.
The behaviour _I_ want is a mount point I can use from the commandline
without being root, and maybe an icon on the desktop.
I don't know how that will translate to zLinux when new DASD arrives...
2) TESTING. Testing can often take as much as half the
development cycle and this is pretty much repeated (or should be)
on every platform.
It depends highly on the app, but once, by way of example, Apache works
on IA32 and Sparc64, there shouldn't be more to do than run the test
suite pretty much to say "we did it, JIC." I'd be fairly surprised if
64-bit z had new problem. 31-bit, maybe.
--
Cheers
John
-- spambait
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