#2 porting kdar to windows

[Omer Enbar]

Hey,

Although kdar is just a wrapper for dar, I really need
a gui for dar in windows.

How hard is it to port the kdar utility to windows? Is
it more difficult than writing a gui wrapper from scratch?

Thanks,
Omer.

[Johnathan Burchill]

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I wouldn't describe kdar as a wrapper for dar, since dar is never
actually called. It is certainly a gui equivalent to dar.
There apparently was a wrapper program that exported
command-lines that called dar itself, but I never actually saw
anything come of this.

KDar is based on the KDE 3.X API, along with many QT 3.X
functions. Most of the KDE functionality can be scaled back to
QT functions (e.g. the KListView is just a fancy QListView),
with fewer features in some cases. The lost features could be
programmed back in by hand. A good example of this is all of
the automatic configuration file functions in KDE: these would
have to be coded to their QT equivalents, or implemented
entirely anew, according to QT's capabilities.

In principle KDar can be ported to the windows version of QT. I
don't know how much work it would take, but I do know it
would take more than several weekends for me. I do not have
any interest in solving this problem directly.

To give you an idea, I got KDar from and idea to a stable
version (1.0.0) in about 5 months of very spare time, by myself,
with help from mainly Denis Corbin regarding the occasional
problem with interfacing to his library. So I suspect that
someone who knows how to program QT on windows will have a
much quicker time porting KDar than starting from scratch.
Note that the source code is marginally documented.

Please feel free to download the CVS sources and compile it
with Windows QT and a C++ compiler, and just start hacking to
make it compile.

If you get it working on windows, I'd be glad to put your source
and binary .zip files on my website.

Good luck,
JB

[Johnathan Burchill]

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Update:

I made an attempt at compiling KDar 2.0.0-CVS on cygwin. KDE now
has cygwin support, so it should be possible to get KDar running on
that. I wasn't successful, but here's what happened:

1) kde-cygwin is based on KDE 3.1.4. These libraries have no
"KFontRequester" class, so I had to manually disable all of the code
that made reference to it.

2) The configure script complained about missing kde commands. It
turns out that they were introduced in KDE 3.2.x, but I couldn't figure
out how to tell configure that I was using KDE 3.1.4. I commented
the problematic lines in configure script.

3) I installed libdar64 successfully, but configure had problems finding
the library. I copied it from /usr/local/lib to /usr/lib, but then configure
could not compile the test program that called libdar::get_version.
Configure completed successfully once I got rid of the get_version call
in the configure script.

4) KDar compiled to the end, but linking failed with a "cannot find -lutil"
I could not locate libutil for cygwin, even though there are reports on
the internet that it comes with one of the cygwin packages. Any
ideas on why the linker failed?

5) I fooled the linker by copying an unused library to libutil.la, and
modifing the .la file appropriately. But when I tried to run kdar, it
failed to initialize properly and quit with an error message.

So that's the story so far. If anyone with experience porting and
compiling KDE programs to kde-cygwin is interested in helping out,
please contact me.

Cheers,
JB