Re: gEDA-user: fritzing

[Miles Gazic <miles.gazic@xxxxxxxxx>]

I agree it's a waste of time to port gEDA to windows, and that a
cross-platform library is the way to go.  I've used SDL a bit, but I
wouldn't pick it for this.  I'd (personally) pick Qt, and recommend
porting gEDA to Qt, so there'd be one unified code base, instead of a
separate codebase for unix+X11 and for (no matter how much code they
have in common).  I've done Qt apps on windows/Linux/OS X, and it
works seamlessly on all 3 platforms.  I prefer it to Win32 or MFC apps
on windows, and it's also my favorite way to write linux apps, even
disregarding cross-platform requirements for either platform.  I tried
making cross-platform gtk apps, and basically gave up, and instead
cross-compiled windows apps from a linux box (something that worked
okay for me, but doesn't help people who are windows-only to develop
the apps).  If you try to port gEDA to windows, you basically will do
all the work of creating a cross-platform toolkit, and have to
maintain it for ever: why not use an existing one?

I'm not saying you should port to Qt or asking someone to do so, or
complaining that gEDA doesn't use Qt now.  Just offering advice on
what to use, if your goal was to make a GUI app run seamlessly on
linux/OS X/windows.

- Miles

PS: I use gEDA on cygwin.  I have a cygwin mirror at work, and I made
a cygwin package for gEDA, as well as making a modified cygwin
installer so that coworkers can run the installer to automatically
install all the packages I think they need from our local mirror,
including my gEDA package.  It was a PITA to set up, and I doubt many
people at companies even an order of magnitude bigger than where I
work will devote the resources to do something like that.  And even
still after all my work, I couldn't get my package to conform to
cygwin's package acceptance criteria, so I never tried to push it
upstream.  Part of the reason was because I couldn't quite figure out
how to get gEDA to build properly, and I had to do ugly hacks to make
it run.  Someone more familiar with gEDA and/or cygwin than I am would
have to make the package for it to get accepted upstream, or I'd have
to spend more time figuring stuff out, and I (sadly) haven't gotten
around to it.


On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 2:50 AM, Michael Torp Kaalund <kaalund@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> If you are going to port a program between operation systems, then it is
> better to use something like libsdl, that can be used to crosscompile.
> Now I hav'nt seen the code for the programs in gEDA, but I think it will
> a while to port the existing code to use something like libsdl, and it
> is something that definally needs a plan to do.
>
> But if you really like gEDA on a windows mashine, then you can try use
> Cygwin.
>
> Thats my 2 cents.
> Hav a nice saturday..
> -Michael Kaalund (Denmark)
> lør, 09 05 2009 kl. 23:06 -0700, skrev Dave N6NZ:
>> Dave McGuire wrote:
>> >> Apparently, programming for Windows is much more difficult than
>> >> programming for unix.
>> >
>> >    I've never seen it, but I'm told that the Windows API is actually
>> > rather nice.  I suspect it's more a matter of more highly-skilled
>> > programmers not working with Windows.  At least for the most part.
>>
>> Windows is just way different.  There is no where near a 1:1 mapping of
>> functionality in API calls between Windows and *nix.  And things that
>> are efficient on one system can be awful on the other... fork() being an
>> example of something that is notoriously expensive on Windows and highly
>> tuned (usually) on *nix.  If you find one of those deeply embedded in
>> the architecture of a program, it can make porting very painful.  And
>> the Windows API specification is much more volatile.
>>
>> Porting isn't easy.  And even if you decide up front to design for
>> portability among Windows, OS X, and X-windows, there is no single,
>> obvious, straight-forward strategy.
>>
>> -dave
>>
>> And don't ask me for more details.... I've purposely avoided Windows
>> programming (because I could) and have fallen woefully behind on Windows
>> programming methodologies.
>>
>>


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