Re: [Tuxpaint-devel] Win95/98/ME build from GSoC Ideas list (was re: GSOC2008)

[John P. <jo...@jo...>]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 02:48:21PM -0700, Bill Kendrick wrote:
> <snipped>
>
> I'm hoping John Popplewell will, in his copious free time, be able to
> help mentor for GSoC.  hee hee hee.

I'm available to help answer questions, but being a mentor sounds like
more than that. I'm sure I could help out a little, perhaps
unofficially.

> So, this isse us this:  Recent versions of Tux Paint added some new
> dependencies, such as SVG libraries, Pango and friends, etc.
> Also, Magic tools were turned into external plug-ins, which no doubt adds
> some additional nightmare to the maintenance of builds and ports.
> (But damnit, I think it's worth it!!!)
> 
> The latest few builds have been made ONLY for Windows XP/2000/Vista.
> When people try to run it on Win95/98/ME, the UI text does not get
> rendered.

The latest versions of GLib and friends don't support win9x/ME - the
compatibility code was ripped out at some point. I experimented with
putting it back in - and it can be done - but is probably isn't worth
it. Also, one of the packages (maybe Pango, I forget) just doesn't work
on win9x/ME because it uses some API features that don't exist on old
versions of Windows.

> Really, I _guess_ this is a relatively simple task (build without Pango
> support; fallback to FreeType via SDL_ttf).

Yeah, that would be the plan. I think it was Tux Paint 0.9.17 that was
built that way. A few of the SVG files didn't work and (I guess) there
were problems rendering some languages.

> However, John hasn't produced any builds yet, so I'm assuming there's
> a 'hitch' that I'm not familiar with.  (Probably related to
> maintaining BOTH builds -- modern and, shall we say "classic"? --
> simultaneously.)

He-he, good guess bill. It should be possible to have both setup
together, I've just not got round to trying it.

Mainly competing things to spend my (minimal) free time on,

cheers,
John.

> If John's not available to help, it really may be a good idea for me
> to DROP that from the GSoC ideas list.  Since I'm not sure who else here
> is that familiar with building for Win32 who could help mentor a student,
> such that the student does their work in a usable and maintainable way.
> 
> What I _don't_ want is "here's a Win95 build!" and that's it, with nothing
> that helps us KEEP building new Win95 versions every time a new version
> comes out...