Enno, this should answer a few of your questions as well. But first: there
is no BeOS port at present. You are most welcome to investigate what's
required though. A native port will have the same problems listed below
for windows etc. Additionally, BeOS seems to like lots of threads and LyX
at present doesn't have many of those so a BeOS port might provide extra
encouragement for us to develop a multiplatform multithreaded future for
LyX.
On Wed, 31 Mar 1999, Patrick [iso-8859-1] M�rissert-Coffini�res wrote:
> Helllo,
>
> There was a thread on comp.programming.literate about the advisability
> of a LyX port to the Windows world, and Martin Kew encouraged us to
> "Lobby or Contribute" . I too think that such a port (Win32 anyway)
> would be useful, and I would consider contributing to the extent of my
> disponibilities, but I wondered, what exactly did it entail?
LyX-1.0.1 can be build using cygwin. There is a link on the www.lyx.org
site to the home of the cygwin binaries (they might even be at ftp.lyx.org
by now I don't know). You will however still require the X11
server/client software and LaTeX which will mean several more megabytes of
stuff you'll need to download.
> First, I read that it was supposed to run under OS2.
The OS/2 port also uses X11 etc. etc.
> This would be good news because it would mean that the code was , to
> some extent, already structured for porting, and that the necessary
> work for a new platform was ready to be evaluated.
Support for native ports is underway in the development version 1.1.x
where we are separating out the gui support and also endevouring to
separate out the filesystem specific stuff. Much of the filesystem stuff
is already separated but there is still a lot of Unix specific code in the
source.
> But in the cvs tree, I did not see much in the OS2 directory. Also a
> port to cygwin might be easier? It might be an intermediate step. What
> is the OS2 status?
Cygwin works as is. OS/2 works as is. But both require X11 and its
support libraries. Mostly its a matter of configuration changes (from the
configure script) so the support is mostly within the source not in a
separate directly.
> Is there any kind of a porting roadmap?
Not exactly. For native ports once LyX is gui and filesystem independent
it should be a very easy task to port any system -- rewrite the
appropriate parts of the gui-specific and filesystem-specific modules.
Separation of the specific modules isn't complete yet. There is some
documentation about the current kernel rewrite and gui-independence on the
www.devel.lyx.org site but nothing about the filesystem independence.
I'll be updating the gui-indep documentation over the next week
(sometime).
> best regards,
>
> Patrick M�rissert-Coffini�res
You're welcome,
Allan. (ARRae)
