Hi,
Please reply with your suggestions for contribution.
Here are my views,
1. Contributing back to the current development brach of the Zsh project.
- This is just by getting our changes under a compiler switch specific to Symbian, may be __SYMBIAN32__, then making sure the code compiles and works as expected for both the platforms. Symbian code structure is different from the Zsh project, hence we need to change this to align with Zsh project.
- Any update to the Symbian specific source can only be performed by using the available Symbian SDK for Windows as we currently don't have one for Linux and there is no solution yet to emulate Symbian OS on Linux.
2. Contribution categorised by platform, having a separate code base for Symbian.
- This is just by pushing our code with the current code structure, the integration to this branch would be an extra effort.
3. Zsh project advertising the source hosted in Symbian Developer Network.
- This doesn't need any contribution to the Zsh project, the integration activities will have to be maintained by Symbian.
Please post your views about any other sort of possibilities.
Thanks,
Karthik.
On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 5:57 PM, Karthik B <
karthikeyan.balu@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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.
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.
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.