Re: [Fresco-devel] Cross-platformability

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On Thursday 21 November 2002 23:23, M. Evans wrote:
> I'm a newbie and curious about the cross-platform possibilities of
> Fresco.  (1) What technical hurdles, if any, would have to be
> overcome to make Fresco run on Mac OS X, Win32, as well as Linux?

We hope that Fresco is rather portable. Our code is ANSI C++, we have a 
library called Prague that is used as some kind of OS-abstraction (handling 
threads, file access, etc. in a nice OO-way). Fresco is absolutly agnostic of 
the input/output and can be configured via a so called console to work with a 
wide variety of hardware-access libraries. With a bit of work that can be 
DirectX or whatever MacOS X uses.

> Also -- (2) does Fresco deal at all with DisplayPDF?  (This is the
> graphics system used in Mac OS X.)

Not yet. Feel free to add it.

> On a less technical note, I'd like to make a statement and then ask a
> related question.  The statement is that I've discussed Fresco with
> several people.  They all said, "oh yeah, that thing has been around
> for years and never gotten anywhere.  We're going to use Xlib."  The
> related question is, (3) how do you propose that I respond to
> such an attitude about Fresco?

Unfortunately they are right: We are not really speeding towards a 1.0 
release. We *are* progressing, but at a slow rate. In parts that used to be 
from a lack of organization. We hope to have improved on that area with our 
new website and especially the long waited for issue tracker 
(issues.fresco.org). That did boost productivity a lot for the last two month 
now since it was finally introduced.

The next thing is that we are progressing slowly since we are covering new 
ground. There's very little code we can use (yes, we are looking for new 
things at all times), there isen't even much discussions going on wrt. things 
we need. So we do talk over lots of things all the time... Yes, sometimes we 
talk too much.

> Having read the history of this project, it is indeed *very*
> confusing; but I am deeply impressed with the capabilities and philosophy
> behind it.  What I'm hearing from colleagues is that
> Fresco is just too risky compared to X which is "standard."

It's not that bad: First there was interviews. That turned into Fresco (a 
toolkit for X). Then GGI started and someone decided to write a windowing 
system on top of that and called it Berlin. At some point Stefan came along 
and ported all the Fresco code into Berlin, changing that projects focus 
completly. After a couple of years of that we now decided to honor our 
ancestors by renaming our project to Fresco. It's that simple:-)

Yes, Fresco is very different from X. That's a good and a bad thing. Good 
since it is way more high level then X, even using most toolkits. The bad 
side of course is that developers will not feel right at home with Fresco.

> All I would add is that the LGPL license will drive away commercial
> developers.  Most of the ones I know completely avoid xGPL, though they
> do use wxWindows, which has a modified LGPL license permitting
> commercial work.  I think that the Mozilla Public License is also more
> friendly than raw LGPL but don't hold me to it.

It is LGPL and -- at least the code I wrote -- will stay under that license. 
It's not really a problem anyway: Connecting to CORBA objects is not 
considered linking afaik, so *using* Fresco is allowed to anyone, even for 
proprietary software. Dunno wether I like that, but I guess it is necessary 
to attrakt commercial interesst at some point.

- -- 
Gruss,
Tobias

- ------------------------------------------------------------
Tobias Hunger           The box said: 'Windows 95 or better'
[email protected]                      So I installed Linux.
- ------------------------------------------------------------
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