Re: [Fresco-devel] Cross-platformability

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?

there are basically two big pieces that need to be ported / provided:
one is a system / platform abstraction. Our 'Prague' sub-project
provides an interface to (mostly) POSIX (file system access, inter-
process communication, threading, etc.). Second, we need an interface
to the i/o of the machine, i.e. input events, and graphical output.
We call this a 'console', and rely on third party libraries to
provide us this functionality.  Right now we have support for two
such tools: GGI, and SDL (more about them on our homepage).

All the rest is pretty high level and very portable.

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

I guess this is a high level language to talk to the graphics
engine. To run on that system we'd either need to provide a console
that outputs 'DisplayPDF', or we'd need to interface directly with
a lower level of the graphics system, which sounds more likely.

> 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 ?

This project is run by volunteers who do it in their (often scarse)
spare time.
Who cares may consider contributing and thus make us progress faster.

> 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.

There is nothing 'unfriendly' in the LGPL. All it does is to ensure
that our work remains free. It is liberal enough to permit our libraries
to be linked with proprietary pieces of code. All it does not allow is
people to grab our code and repackage it into their own non-free code.

What you may be thinking of is the GPL, which is 'viral' in the sense
that it requires all code it is linked with to be free (according to
some appropriate definition of 'free').


Regards,
		Stefan