after reading the raging debate over Win32 ports I decided to take a look at
the patches Claus Hentschel and I made. To my surprise I found out that
Miyata Shigeru had already wrapped up my patch in a nice os:: class
(Thanks!!!). Is there a reason that it hasn't been submitted to CVS as
yet???
I've updated it slightly to match the current cvs, and it works OK for me.
The only thing it does for now is changing pathnames in order to use fptex
(teTeX for win32). The executable won't survive without being run from a
cygwin bash shell, but I'll add some stuff to change that soon.
Claus changes more things than I do for his port, but I don't think all of
his changes are strictly necessary, i.e. it works for me without them. For
the time being, my idea of a win32 port be something that compiles out of
the box using cygwin, and can be run without any shell scripts (apart from
starting a X-Server). This would open up the possibility to distribute lyx
as a 'proper' cygwin package, installable the by the cygwin installer, which
makes installation pretty straightforward for the average windows user.
When more exciting frontends become available the port could be turned into
something more fancy. I've tried to compile qt for X11 once under cygwin,
and this is actually possible. So I suppose it won't be that hard to do a
cygwin+qt2 for win32 port by someone with a proper license. Coming back to
this rather *sensitive* topic, I have the following to add:
from the questions Claus and I are getting from people who are actually
using the win32 port, I can tell that every one of them only cares about
functionality, and not about looks. They definetely don't care about
ethically correct toolkits/compilers/sourcecode. I've never gotten any
complaints about bad xforms looks, just the kind of questions you would
expect from someone who has never seen a *nix command prompt. Basically,
anything that will relieve the win32 port of the need for a X-Server would
be very welcome. This comes down to a finished qt2/gtk+/fltk port, I'm just
hoping this will happen anytime within the next year...
--Ruurd
os_spec.diff.gz
