[wxWorkshop-dev] State of Conversion to wxWidgets-2.6.1 - week 3

[<wxw...@li...>]

Hello,

Time again for my weekly summary on what is going on with wxWorkshop.

We added a new Developer to the Project, Tod Filer, who has been 
furthering the work to get wxWorkshop to compile with Microsoft's Visual 
Studio 2003. 

George Tasker was also able to get wxWorkshop to compile a week earlier 
on his Visual Studio 2003 (VS2003) setup although I understand he had a 
lot of headaches.  Tod Filer added some patches to CVS and he reports 
that he was able to get wxWorkshop to compile with his VS2003 setup as 
well.  It appears that both George and Tod can not start looking for the 
other bugs and resolving some issues.  Tod reports that his version of 
the build on VS2003 also works with the wxWidgets-2.6.1 (wxW-2.6.1) 
included xrc libraries, and he has been using some of the files I have 
altered to include the Unicode macros and replace deprecated functions 
with the only issue being the outlctrl.cpp file in the src/wspp 
directory, an issue with wxArrayString handling error that is not 
present with the wxArrayString handling already included in other 
files.  Tod also reports that he is getting an Assert Error that he 
thinks is coming from the pmf libraries as well, and he is investigating 
that problem.  I believe both George and Tod are compiling wxWorkshop on 
an ANSI build of wxMSW if I am not mistaken.

As for my progress, I have been lagging behing George and Tod as I have 
been going through each source file and converting types and strings to 
Unicode strings, as well as handling conversions between the two, to get 
wxWorkshop to compile on my Unicode wxGTK-2.6.1 environment, which has 
been a lot of work since, obviously, wxWorkshop was never written to be 
Unicode aware.  I have to admit that I am a lot better in picking the 
functions to convert between Unicode wxStrings and char arrays than I 
was when I started this project. 

As most of you know, the Unicode version of wxW is much pickier about 
the String types, and will not just accept a literal string as a proper 
type for a Unicode string, so I have had to make a large use of the 
_T("string") macro to indicate that this is to be a Unicode string, and 
I've had to do a lot of wxString::FromAscii() and wxString::ToAscii() 
functions to convert between char strings and wxStrings in the files.  
Fortunately, the ANSI build of wxW appears to ignore the _T() macro, and 
things seem to work as before the files were 'converted' to Unicode.  
This makes a good case to me for always programming the wxWidgets 
application like a Unicode application for future implementations, even 
though it may just be built on an ANSI environment. 

In addition I have been converting deprecated functions into the newer 
recommended replacement functions with the most common conversions 
being:  First()->GetFirst(), Number()->GetCount, KeyCode->GetKeyCode, 
GetSystemColour->GetColour, etc.   The only deprecations I've left in 
the code currently is in the diamond directory, where the g++ compiler 
informs me that the Headers used in those files are deprecated, and need 
to be converted to the equivalent C++ headers.  For now, I am leaving 
this until I get a build that executes on my Machine.

Also, a major conversion I am doing is to replace all wxStringList type 
variables with the wxArrayString variables as recommended on both the 
wxWidgets-2.6.1 and 2.4.2 manuals where the notation under the 
wxStringList is "NB:  This class is obsolete, please don't use it any 
longer.  You can use wxArrayString or type safe list class instead."  I 
am probably wrong, but I also looked up the wxStringList definition in 
the include file, and I thought I saw that it is making the memory space 
for the wxStringList, then copying it over to an wxArrayString.  If that 
is the case, I thought it would be better to use the wxArrayString from 
the start without having more memory allocated than needed.

All this has led up to being able to build all of the shared libraries 
in the wxWorkshop/src directories, and I have made separate *.linux 
files to be able to compile just for the linux environment in all 
directories without interferring with the other platform make 
environments.  I still need to do a lot more work with these Makefiles 
before inflicting them on the public at large.

Currently, I am working on converting the .cpp files in the 
wxWorkshop/ws directory, having half of them converted and compiling.  I 
hope to have an executable soon.  All of my work is checked into the 
wxWorkshop CVS repository except for the files I've converted in the ws 
directory, but I expect to have those checked in the next couple of days.

My immediate future plans are to:
1) Build and troubleshoot the Executable & Sources (including fixing 
some conversion mistakes I'm sure I have made).
2) Finalize the Linux Build environment (I hope to get autogen involved).

=================

Other Notes:

--Notes on the CVS Repository:

Just to sum up the State of the Repository, Before this new work was 
done, the existing v0.7.0 code in the Repository was tagged as 
"BEFORE_UPDATE_TO_WXWIDGETS261", and this Code is also Branched under 
the Label "v_0_7_0_wxWidgets_2_4_2" for anybody who wishes to keep 
developing the wxWorkshop 0.7.0 version on wxWidgets-2.4.2/2.5.x.  The 
MAIN branch contains all our work to convert wxWorkshop to 
wxWidgets-2.6.1/2.6.2 when wxW-2.6.2 is released (in 3 days?).

--Insights to the Linux Porting I am undertaking:

It occurs to me that I have never explained to exactly which Linux 
parameters I am fixing wxWorkshop to compile under, so let me some 
specifications on my Linux computer that I am using to build wxWorkshop:

Computer:  Sony VAIO Laptop PCG-FRV37
Processor:  Pentium 4 - 2.8Ghz
Ram:  512Mbyte
Hard Disk:  60Gbyte

Linux Distribution:  Gentoo Source Distribution (kept updated nightly)
                               <Gentoo is a versionless distribution>
Compiler:  g++ v3.4.4
wxWidgets:  2.6.1 Unicode (from wxALL, but using wxGTK), compiled from 
source tarball.
wxWidgets Installation Directory Prefix:  /usr/local

===================

George & Tod, please correct me if I've made some inadvertent mistakes 
in this E-mail.  The mistakes are unintentional.


--James