On Fri, 8 Aug 2003, Norman Gray wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Aug 2003, Rankin, SE (Stephen) wrote:
>
> > I have just had a person asking to see if our software will run under Mac.
> > He was using 'Yellow Dog Linux on Mac'. Using the Mac Linux may be a good
> > way of porting to Mac initially. He is also going to try RedHat ix86 Linux
> > with Connectix' Virtual PC on a Mac.
>
> While this may work for this user, and is a good idea, there's no way we
> could seriously claim that this would count as a Mac port. That isn't
> to say we shouldn't do it, just not under that heading.
Agreed, the whole idea of porting to Yellow Dog Linux on Mac rather than
Mac OS X seems a little crazed. It doesn't really lead to anything that is
worth announcing (I can't imagine that a huge percentage of Mac users are
running linux rather than OSX).
> Two minor points, just while they occur to me. Going the route of finding
> a Quartz port of AGI would probably be better than just using Apple's
> X server, since presumably that would give the appropriate look, if not
> entirely the look-and-feel.
Surely an X server is still required though? What about SkyCat/GAIA? Even
if TCL works with Aqua, will the RTD widget?
> Also, on a Mac, just as on Windows, you'd need to do some work with an
> appropriate installer, otherwise folk would start off with a very bad
> feeling about the software. OS X installers are basically a tarball (or
> rather, paxball) plus a few shell scripts, but there's a quite detailed
> set of guidelines they obey, so setting this up would require at least
> some extra effort.
Installers are not usually that hard, but again, CVS is the key. Once you
know that the fixes for each app/library can be applied reliably then this
becomes feasible. It also only took Al and I 4 hours to get all the
Starlink libraries + a couple of apps into RPM format - the makefile fixes
were small tweaks more than anything.
--
Tim Jenness
JAC software
http://www.jach.hawaii.edu/~timj
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