[webkit-dev] Porting Gtk+WebCore

[Michael Maibaum]

On 10 Jun 2005, at 16:59, Kevin Ollivier wrote:

> Hi Kent,
>
> On Jun 10, 2005, at 2:24 AM, Kent Sandvik wrote:
>
>
>> On 6/10/05, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> There's really several different things in the KWQ directory:
>>>
>>> 1) Fairly platform-agnostic replacements for things like data
>>> structures and QString (QDict is one exception here, but we'll be
>>> changing that to not rely on CFDictionary any more). These could  
>>> just
>>> be used for any platform that uses KWQ instead of the real Qt.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Hmm, CF Lite (Core Foundation Lite)? The only issue I see is the
>> license that is neither BSD nor LGPL for the CFLite sources... But
>> those could then be ported across various platforms, already working
>> for Linux), and the data structures and so forth are nice, string
>> classes that support Unicode, unless there's too much overlap between
>> KQW and CFLite...
>>
>
> BTW, I wanted to point out that when we started wxWebCore, we  
> evaluated using CFLite, only to find that the software no longer  
> builds outside of OS X/Darwin (even w/patches applied) and hasn't  
> for some time.
>
> In order to get it to build, I had to go back to using the CFLite  
> sources from initial Panther releases, which was the version used  
> in the CFLite tutorial on the ADC web site. (even some subsequent  
> 10.3.x releases of CFLite didn't build) In addition, in newer  
> versions, there are now several places where CFLite references  
> private OS X/Darwin headers. ;-/ It's possible we could have got it  
> to work somehow, but we decided that we couldn't use CFLite for our  
> port if it wasn't being maintained in a cross-platform manner.
>
> It would, of course, be great if CFLite were made to work cross- 
> platform again and have Windows support added. But IMHO, looking at  
> the sources, it's probably an easier task to remove CF from common  
> bits of KWQ and JSCore (as there isn't a whole lot) than it is to  
> have someone maintaining CFLite cross-platform and being sure it  
> builds on Windows as well, etc. There's lots of CF code in the  
> platform-specific part, but that's closely tied with Cocoa, so we  
> had to re-implement those bits anyways, and it was easier just to  
> use our own APIs for that. So far, that's been our experience.



I just wanted to point out the efforts at OpendDarwin on  
libFoundation - http://libfoundation.opendarwin.org/ I know it has at  
least partial NSString support and is being built and tested against  
the Apple Foundation API specification. I have no idea if this is  
actually useful at this point, but ...

Michael