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

[Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 17 Jul 2008 10:47:25 +0530
"Karthik B" <karthikeyan.balu@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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.

That's fine...  I'm expecting that there'll be #ifdef's in the code;
probably the messier part is working out where to put your non-standard
build code.  Ideally, it would be good (both for you to maintain it and
for us not to mess it up) if this could live in a subdirectory, but
Makefile-style files in the source directories aren't a problem.  I think
the major limitation is that we'll have to be careful that the distribution
doesn't come with files that normally get autogenerated.  (I'm not familiar
with Symbian myself.)

> 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.

Don't really like this one, I think that's likely to be too much effort to
keep going.  I would hope that enough little tweaks could be made by the
Symbian developers to keep the normal code aligned.  The fundamentals of
zsh (OS-related parts) don't tend to change that much.

> 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.

This is certainly no problem, but it would be worth at least exploring a
better integration.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxx>                  Software Engineer
CSR PLC, Churchill House, Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Road
Cambridge, CB4 0WZ, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070