I do not wish to start a flame war, but I respectfully disagree with your assessment of VMS porting support.
I believe there are at least five of us in the Perl VMS community who could step in if Craig Berry needed to step down from his Perl VMS duties. I hope that never happens, but don't write VMS off. Please. Current hardware is still manufactured, and the latest Intel Itanium processor will be supported by VMS. Five years from now, I expect that situation to be the same. VMS has been around since 1977. It is actively supported and developed at HP. Carl Friedberg www.esb.com The Elias Book of Baseball Records 2013 Edition -----Original Message----- From: bulk88 [mailto:bul...@hotmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 3:38 PM To: Konovalov, Vadim (Vadim)** CTR ** Cc: perl5-port...@perl.org; Steve Hay; Nicholas Clark; Jan Dubois Subject: Re: status of WinCE Perl port in 2012 Konovalov, Vadim (Vadim)** CTR ** wrote: > tl;dr > > 'wince' port is still stangates, I have no objections for it to be removed, > but maybe it still usefull to wait a bit more and to see on where will go > other OS projects, namely QT and firefox, WRT this platform, > and then follow their path. > > Opinions welcome. > > More text follow. > > First, let me express my gratitude to the community for the support. > > Next, my vision of the port. > > Currently, 'wince' port is based on 'celib' library, which is gone from the > WEB > and which is randomly located on old folders of some rare people (me > included) > > The idea that I was having was to get rid of dependancy of 'celib', (at least > URLs to CELIB aren't pointing to downloadable files anyway) > > 2 ways: 1) embed needed pieces of CELIB and 2) look how other projects > with 'wince' port do. Embedding CELIB into Perl's git (license???) or uploading to CPAN is the solution. How much modulizing/Alien:: CELIB needs IDK. I don't think anyone will be fixing any bugs in CELIB other than a Perl WM/CE user. Is this the same celib http://celib.cvs.sourceforge.net/celib/ ? > > One of most interesting libraries that support 'wince' is QT. > An idea was to 1) look how QT does the thing and 2) maybe try building Perl > with QT library (license issues are left aside, just experiments purposes) > > It appears that overall ability to build QT for wince decreases over time. > > As many already know, http://qt-project.org/ announced their 5.0 version, > and anouncement > http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2012/12/19/qt-5-0/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=qt-5-0 > contains QT roadmap http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QgG9oYhH-c > which mentions port to 1) android and further to 2) windows mobile... > > but even http://qt-project.org/downloads contains "Qt libraries 4.8.4 for > Windows CE (269 MB)" > but not 5.0 for WINCE. > There is mention that Qt 5 will support "Windows 8 (WinRT)" among current > Mobile platforms. > WinRT/WP 8 is not related to WinCE kernel OSes. The distance is somewhere between OS9 and OSX or even further than those 2. > Going through helpful QT recomendations at > > http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/requirements-wince.html > http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/windowsce-customization.html > http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/install-wince.html > > suggests getting proper cross-compiler, and this is helpful. > > There are also other helpful links such as > http://qt-project.org/forums/viewthread/1138 > http://qt-project.org/forums/viewthread/633 > http://qt-project.org/forums/viewthread/13621 > which are inspiring. > Looks complicated. Not sure if CELib or QT is harder to use from a C/build process point. > > On the other side - reading the article at > http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57431236-92/microsoft-bans-firefox-on-arm-based-windows-mozilla-says/ > and wikipedia article on > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone_8 > makes me think that there is no C/C++ for development altogether, and even > that - getting mobile > development kit requires Windows 8 OS (not even Vista) which makes me stop at > this point. > Perl won't run without jailbreaking on iOS, and will never be in the App Store. Unless AS does something, Perl will never run on WP 8 un-jailbroken. Jailbroken WP8 is regular C++ Win32 we know and love http://i.imgur.com/lWKjp.png . http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/windows/apps/hh694083 the rules seem to have an non-embedded interpreted language ban (the high level script is not replaceable), more liberal than iOS, but still no Perl. I don't think there is any market for AS to do a signed WP8 Perl anyway. (Jan, maybe you can answer what AS's plans are with AP and WP8?) > Also - reading this article - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone - > makes me think that even binaries will not be run on newer windows phone?? > <quote> > Terry Myerson, corporate VP of Windows Phone engineering, said, "With the > move to capacitive touch screens, away from the stylus, and the moves to some > of the hardware choices we made for the Windows Phone 7 experience, we had to > break application compatibility with Windows Mobile 6.5." > </quote> > My interest is in stylus based mid 2000s WM OSes. WP 7 (CE based) IMO is beta for WP 8's GUI and unrelated to other CE series. > So, two questions are > 1) is port needed? does it worth efforts? Good question. Philosophy wise, I say some effort should be tried. In 5 years I predict Perl 5 will run on only 2 OSes, generic POSIX (limited to Linux, OSX, and BSD), and maybe Win32. If Perl is only run on POSIX, then POSIX will creep into the codebase. Having non-POSIX platforms helps with POSIX not creeping in. On the otherhand, if there are no smoke tests, and no users to report bugs, it is useless to keep the platform around "in case" someone comes with a bug (or maybe the real reason to keep around dead platforms is for bragging rights), right? Looking at Perl's special platforms (first part is my opinion of the amount of support these OSes require in LOC in Perl, 2nd part is my guess at how POSIX they are), Plan 9 (low, semi-unix), Qnx (low, unix), Symbian (high, non-unix), Cygwin (low, semi-unix, 1-2 porters, last known smoke http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.daily-build.reports/2012/10/msg128941.html ), OS2 (high, non-unix), Netware (high, non-unix), VMS (high, non-unix?, 1 porter), and djgpp (high, non-unix, already marked for removal) are heading towards removal in the next 5 years. Win32 will be the only non-POSIX platform left. Now the dilemma with cable boxing/walled gardens is, if everything is a cable box, what is the developer's system? a cable box? :-D MS made free almost all their development tools over the last half decade, probably to keep up with FOSS platforms. But the tide could always turn back towards a $10K license fee. > 3) sit a while and look at what happens at QT/windows mobile port?? I think nothing will happen. WM/CE are dead. Most people throw away mobile devices after 18-24 months. CE has no console window. Who will provide it? http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KDE_on_Windows/Windows_CE#Console CELIB sounds better than that. >> >> All in all, now I confirm usefulness of a port and do promise to >> provide stable build of it, including binaries, including perl+tcltk. > > Regards, > Vadim. I have a CE build enviroment setup. Now the question is about repairing the makefile/build process. If it is less than a week of work (for me, and maybe Vadim) to keep it working with blead, it should remain.
