Hi, I'm forwarding this mail to the list since I think it is of general interest. Salut, Sven
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- To: "Sven Neumann" <sven@xxxxxxxx>
- Subject: Re: GIMP on OS/2
- From: "Adrian Gschwend" <ktk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2003 17:53:37 +0200 (CDT)
On 16 Apr 2003 16:23:24 +0200, Sven Neumann wrote: Hi Sven! >I heard about the GIMP OS/2 'port' and as the maintainer of the GIMP >project, I am of course curious about it. Would you mind to explain >what exactly this port is, which GIMP version it is based on and, of >most interest, why you are not working in the main-line source tree? Sure! As you might now GIMP was available on OS/2 for quite some time now, the port was never "native", that means we always used an XFree86/OS2 Session to run GIMP in it. That means all the window-drawing methods were done by XFree86/OS2 and people had to install XFree86 first (which was not that easy back then). It was/is possible to run XFree86 in a kind of "fullscreen"-Session on OS/2. Latest version we have at the moment is also 4.3.x The version we released now is using a different approach: We started to write a library that maps all X-calls to PM (Presentation Manager, the X of OS/2). Like this we can theoreticaly run every X-application on OS/2 and it looks (more or less) like an OS/2 application and does not require XFree86 installed. This opens GIMP to a bigger Userbase on OS/2 because most people didn't install XFree86 so far. The project for this X-Wrapper is called "Everblue" (http://everblue.netlabs.org). Currently the port is based on Gimp 1.02, basicaly because this version is much more stable than the 1.2.x version we also have on OS/2 (used with Everblue, on XFree86/OS2 it's quite stable). The beta release we provide is really just for testing Everblue and to collect Everblue bugs (we have a bugtracker for Everblue at xtracker.netlabs.org). Like this we can fix Everblue and make it more reliable, the next step will be to compile GIMP 1.2.x with it and the final step will be to catch up developement again and to compile the latest unstable tree of GIMP out of CVS. But first we have to compile the latest GTK libraries as well. Currently we ported GCC 3.2.x and plans are to compile everything with the latest GCC in the future. There are some other projects as well which are related to GIMP and Everblue, one of them is called UnixOS2 and it's basically a full POSIX library with the tools/libraries you got on Linux-like systems. It's a bit like Cygwin on Windows but even more Unix-Like I would say. We use this base to do all the ports in the future, it simplyfies things a lot because we try to avoid OS/2-specific #ifdefs like this. >I'd very much appreciate if you or someone else from netlabs.org could >subscribe to the gimp-developer mailing list and introduce the GIMP >OS/2 project there but of course you may answer me directly as well. good point, will try to make sure that one of our main Everblue developers joins the list. You might want to forward that mail to the list, like this other people understand the idea of that release and the concept. BTW the former main head behind GIMP on OS/2 was Asbjoern Pettersen, I think last contact I had with him was about two years ago (IIRC) and he told he doesn't have enough time anymore to keep up development. He was working on the original CVS tree back then and I think that's the way we should go in the future as well. The one who did the current "native" GIMP is Sebastian Wittmeier. I CCed the mail to those two guys as well. Thanks for the mail, I hope I could clarify some things. cu Adrian PS: On this way thanks to all the GIMP developers, it's awesome! -- Adrian Gschwend @ netlabs.org ktk [a t] netlabs.org ------- Free Software for OS/2 and eCS http://www.netlabs.org
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