Re: Zsh migrated to Symbian OS - Contributing back details.

I understand that the changes have to be merged with the current development branch of the Zsh project, meanwhile i would be glad to answer any of your specific queries.

Karthik.

On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 10:53 AM, <Karthikeyan.Balu@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi All,
Further to the below mail from Peter Stephenson, this would give a broad overview of the changes to Zsh project during its migration onto Symbian OS.

Let me know how can we move further on this activity.

Symbian OS supports Zsh

1. Overview:
The Open source Zsh was migrated onto Symbian OS using PIPS (PIPS is POSIX on Symbian OS) libraries, the Standard set of POSIX libraries on Symbian.

None of the Zsh project defects have been fixed during this activity and all the changes are to support Zsh on Symbian OS.

2. Limitations:
This section elaborates the features that were not supported due to the limitations in PIPS/Symbian.
a. Signal related features are not supported -
PIPS currently don't support Signals, because of which features like stopping, terminating a process are not supported. Signals are being implemented and this can be supported soon.

3. Key modifications to open source Zsh:
a. Make changes
The build and the project specification files for Symbian reflect the .Makefile of Zsh project. The tools of Symbian will use these specifications to generate the binary.

b. Source changes
Most of the changes during the migration have been blocked under __SYMBIAN32__ which is defined by the tools.

As Symbian doesn't support two phase construction of a process, popen3() an API which creates a process with the image and gets three file descriptors corresponding to the stdio of the child process is used instead of fork() and exec (). Most of the changes done to Zsh project are specific to the usage of popen3 ().

4. Sourced from and version:

http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Programming/Interpreters/Zsh-1183.shtml(4.2.6 version).

Thanks,
Karthik.

Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxx>
04/29/2008 03:41 PM

To
Karthikeyan.Balu@xxxxxxxxxxx

cc

Subject
Re: Zsh migrated to Symbian OS - Contributing back details.

Hi, Thanks for the note... we'd certainly be interested in integrating your changes back to zsh. This would have to be the latest development version (4.3) since there isn't any active development of older branches. As you no doubt know, most of the discussion about details goes on on the zsh-workers mailing list. We'd be happy to look at patches to allow compilation on Symbian. Putting appropriate #ifdef's in the code is probably the easy bit; setting up the configuration in the first place is perhaps more difficult. Are you using a cross-compiler? This probably makes things difficult, since zsh has to probe various bits of run-time behaviour when configure is run. We would probably need to look at other ways of providing the necessary information. Alternatively, I suppose we might be able to supply a library of pre-built configuration headers for special cases like this. Anyway, if you let the mailing list know the sort of changes you have we can start to think about the best way of integrating them. Regards, pws -- Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxx> Software Engineer CSR PLC, Churchill House, Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Road Cambridge, CB4 0WZ, UK Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070

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Hi Peter,

To introduce myself, Iam a software engineer working for a company called Symbian (www.symbian.com) in Bangalore, India.

I have been subscribed to zsh-workers since long time and have seen lots of your postings related to submissions/defect fixes/technical discussions, so thought you would be my better point of contact for my interest.

Actually, i was involved in a project of Symbian where we had migrated Zsh onto Symbian OS sourced from the opensource Zsh project (http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Programming/Interpreters/Zsh-1183.shtml), now we are interested to look at the possibilities of contributing back our changes to the Zsh project, for which i would like to know the process involved from the Zsh project perspective and moving forward we can discuss about the changes and the list of features that we were not able to support due to certain limitations.

Iam sorry if you are not the right person for this query, please do redirect me to the person who would be of better help in that case.

PS: This is just an initial mail to inform about our work, we can further discuss in detail.

Thanks,
Karthik.