Re: gnustep on windows

[Fred Kiefer]

Paul Fox wrote:
> Currently, I am, for various reasons, tied to Windows for most of the
> time. I also think GNUstep looks as if it would make a good
> cross-platform development library (more elegant than QT, and without
> all the restrictions.)  However, in the course of examining and
> attempting to build GNUstep for Windows, I've discovered that  Cairo
> graphics for GNUstep under Windows are unimplemented. I'm interested in
> correcting that, and, from a cursory glance, it doesn't look
> tremendously difficult, but I haven't spent a lot of time yet tracking
> down all the bits of X dependent code, so I'm wondering if anyone knows
> how deep this dependency runs.
> 

There shouldn't be any X dependencies in the cairo backend code apart
from the X surfaces of course. You should be able to provide your own MS
Windows surface and use that. This gets a bit harder on the make file
level, here our config scripts currently only support the cairo backend
for X11.
There is one other problem I see, although freetype is available for
Windows you will most likely want to use native font support. For this
you will need to implement your own classes or port the ones from the
the winlib backend.
Out of curiosity, why do you want to use cairo on Windows and not the
native window interface (or one based on GDI+)?


> When I have more time (who knows when that will be!) I will take a
> deeper look and try to figure out everything that needs to be done to
> enable the Cairo backend on Windows.
> 
> On a side note, I've heard that there are plans for a theming API, but
> I've had some difficulty finding any details. Where could I find out
> about that?
> 
There already is some limited theming available in GNUstep. You find the
API and the code for it in gui/Source/GSTheme.m.

Cheers
Fred