Re: [Themis-dev] 12/5/2008 Status

[Raymond R. <ra...@ba...>]

Mark Hellegers wrote:
> Hi Raymond,
>
>   
Hi Mark! Saw you in some pictures from BeGeistert taken by Nicholas 
Blachford! :-)
>> Earlier this week, I managed to put together a tiny Intel Atom
>> 330 based computer which can boot and run Haiku. Aside from needing to
>> use the VESA video driver, and a quirk that keeps popping up when typing
>> (Haiku seems to think I'm occasionally holding a key down long after I've
>> released it), it seems beyond stable enough to do development on.
>>     
>
> Very nice. I'm still waiting for an official alpha release before I give
> it a spin.
>
> [snip makefile changes for Haiku]
>
> Is your makefile still BeOS compatible then ?
> Did you mention the denpendency generation problem to the Haiku developers
> ?
>
>   
At the moment it is as far as I know. I didn't make any real Haiku 
specific modifications to it. Right now, all of the lines that generate 
or include the dependency files have been commented out, and I'm getting 
the suspicious feeling that Haiku's compiler or make might be smarter 
that that included with BeOS R5: during my tinkering, it seems like only 
the appropriate files are getting recompiled when I make a change. I'm 
not sure if changing a header file will do that properly or not, but 
things seem to be fine with out them. The only other changes I've made 
to the makefile is to replace the references to _APP_ in the add-on 
lines with Themis/Themis, and add -soname=_APP_ to the framework compile 
line.
>> I also had to check-out a copy of the repository via cvs to get a
>> pristine copy of the themis.rsrc resource file to replace the copy that
>> was in the Subversion repository. I'm guessing that when I converted the
>> repository to svn years ago from cvs, that the resource file some how got
>> corrupted in the process, and as a result was preventing xres from adding
>> the resource file to the compiled Themis binary.
>>     
>
> Yeah, I noticed that too. Thanks for fixing it.
>
>   
No problem, I wish I had been able to detect that earlier.
>>  The main problem that
>> I've had outside of compiling is that the add-ons are not loading. I
>> haven't investigated the reason they aren't loading yet, but all of them
>> have compiled successfully, and are located where they are supposed to be
>> located. Hopefully, I'll have the time this weekend to investigate this,
>> and possibly even fix the problem(s).
>>     
>
> Did you manage to fix the problem ?
>
>   
Yep, the problem was that because the add-ons were being linked against 
_APP_, which was the traditional way of allowing add-ons to access the 
host's functions and objects, Haiku was looking for a library called 
_APP_. After I figured that out, I tested with a symlink from the 
framework app to the local lib directory with a filename _APP_ and the 
add-ons loaded right away and worked properly. A bit later, I added the 
-soname=_APP_ to the framework compile line and replaced all other 
references to _APP_ with Themis/Themis, and everything continued to 
work. I don't know if that will work on BeOS or not, but I suspect it won't.
>> I intend to build a library out of the V8 Javascript engine that was
>> developed as part of Google's Chrome web browser. I have checked out a
>> copy of that repository and tried compiling it with scons (the build
>> software they're using), but haven't gotten it to do much that way,
>> probably because Haiku isn't on their supported list, so it wasn't taken
>> into account in the SControl file. So, I've started looking for a way to
>> circumvent this by building a makefile, but that's so far resulted in an
>> error dealing with a static cast from one type to another using STL. I'm
>> not very knowledgeable about STL, so this has halted my initial progress
>> in that direction. I don't know if it's a genuine error in the code, or
>> if it's just that gcc 2.95.x which is in use on BeOS and Haiku is too old
>> to handle it. If you happen to know and/or are more knowledgeable about
>> STL than I am, I'd appreciate a bit of help there.
>>     
>
> I program using the STL myself, but I also know the error messages the
> comiler can generate if things go wrong with STL and they are not pretty.
> You can post the error here or maybe on bedevtalk and see what happens.
>
>   
I'll post it here a bit later, I'm under some pressure with my job to 
get a project usable by tomorrow morning.
>> That about covers things for the moment, but please let me know if you
>> have any thoughts, comments, or ideas.
>>     
>
> It's nice to see someone committing code for Themis again. It's been a
> while.
> Are you planning to do real development again ?
>
> Mark
>   
That's my plan, though it won't be the near constant work that we did 
years ago... I have a lot to re-learn, and I'm finding some interesting 
bugs that I'm going to have to figure out. For instance, I discovered 
that there are sites (like Microsoft's live.com) out there that aren't 
sending cookies in the correct format: some aren't sending the domain or 
path that the cookie is supposed to apply to, and while I wrote code to 
handle those situations years ago, it doesn't look like it's working 
properly, so I'm going to have to dig in and find out why not.

Raymond