[Fwd: Report]

[Lou Burnard]

Some more background on the "osx for windows" project, from the developer.

<p>-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Report
Date: Fri, 7 May 2004 16:49:44 +0100
From: Tony Dodd <tony.dodd at btinternet.com>
To: 'Lou Burnard' <lou.burnard at computing-services.oxford.ac.uk>

OSX runtime for Windows

I have downloaded and tested version 1.5.1 of Open SP from sourceforge. I
encountered the following problems:

1. James Clark's templates have been instantiated in classes for which they
were never intended, relying on a non-standard feature in gcc that allows a
default constructor to be created for a class even if it has an explicit
constructor. These give compile errors in Visual Studio net. I have fixed
this though not very elegantly.
2. Some DLL entry points had not been correctly annotated. This is a
windows-specific issue.
3. OSX has had some extra options added and the code for these are written
using a gcc extension that allows an array to be dimensioned with variable
size. I replaced all of these with new statements and added corresponding
deletes.
4. The new OSX code has memory leaks which I did not correct in case the
corresponding deletes are a problem on some other platform.
5. There is a minor problem in the naming of a configuration file.

I corrected these problems and was then able to build an excecutabe using
Visual Studio .NET. This executable has been subjected to limited testing.
It should be noted that in OSX in particular the code has been changed quite
radically since the last James Clark build. A host of extra command line
switches have been added and I cannot be sure that all of them have been
adequately tested.

I also added a dialog-based interface to osx to the xaira indextools
application.

I propose to gain CVS access to the sourceforge project, test my changes on
the latest build and then submit them. I have, however, not yet received
agreement from the project team for this. Looking at traffic on the project
site, I am in some doubt whether any future releases are planned. I will
keep Lou informed, but if all else fails I would suggest that the source of
the 1.5.1 release suitably fixed and tested on other platforms might be
placed within the TEI project pending some sign of activity from those
responsible for Open Jade and Open SP.

Tony Dodd