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Sarc · Nov 21, 2001, 08:27 PM

Does anyone have an idea of how hard could it be to bring Licq (www.licq.org) ICQ client for mac os X ? as far as I know it's open sourced and runs on my linux machine very, very well, very feature loaded.

Sarc

tobli · Nov 22, 2001, 08:16 AM

To bring the command line client to OSX should hopefully be relatively easy. One area that could hinder that is the pthread support in OS X. I know it's not 100% complete, so one can only hope that licq doesn't use those parts that Apple hasn't implemented yet. You'll need the OS X developer tools to try this.

The gui, that is provided as a plugin, is a completely separate issue. It uses the Qt libraries from Trolltech (www.troll.no). I think that Qt for X11 has been ported to OS X and is available from the Fink project. This will run the GUI on top of XFree86. Also Trolltech recently ported the Qt APIs to compile native MacOS X apps running in Aqua. According to them every Qt application should just compile, but I have no experience whatsoever in that area and can't comment more on that.

Angus_D · Nov 22, 2001, 12:20 PM

Originally posted by tobli:
The gui, that is provided as a plugin, is a completely separate issue. It uses the Qt libraries from Trolltech (www.troll.no). I think that Qt for X11 has been ported to OS X and is available from the Fink project.

Yup, in fact we just updated to 3.0.0.

Also Trolltech recently ported the Qt APIs to compile native MacOS X apps running in Aqua. According to them every Qt application should just compile, but I have no experience whatsoever in that area and can't comment more on that.

Note that Qt/X is not free (it's their commercial version only, although they offer it free for academic use IIRC).

Sarc · Nov 22, 2001, 06:22 PM

So theoretically it isn't very hard to get a native OS X Licq ?[/LIST]

tobli · Nov 23, 2001, 03:18 AM

Originally posted by Sarc:
So theoretically it isn't very hard to get a native OS X Licq ?[/LIST]

I did a very quick test yesterday and downloaded the latest licq release and tried to build it according to the instructions included. It did not go that well. I have very limited experience and knowledge about what goes on behind the scenes when using a configure script. All I saw was that it complained about a few things (missing headers, and something about pthreads). Maybe someone with a little more experience (someone from the Fink project?) could have a look at it. I guess there are quite a few standard procedures when fixing up a project from another unix platform.

Angus_D · Nov 23, 2001, 07:34 AM

It's already down as a package request in Fink so I guess one of us will port it when we feel like it

tobli · Nov 23, 2001, 08:56 AM

Originally posted by Angus_D:
It's already down as a package request in Fink so I guess one of us will port it when we feel like it

Are there any porting docs, apart from what's available on the Fink home page under documentation? What would be great are some real world examples, a step by step on the changes required to port some packages. A faq with "these are common errors, and this is what you change" would be really nice. I guess one could start sending annoying mails to the fink developer list for each problem, but I'd rather not.

Also, can anyone recommend a good overview of the whole build process? I've used make files before, but I'm not sure how the configure scripts and all fit in to this. In the licq distribution there's a Makefile.am and a Makefile.in. The meaning of those is not clear to me. My guess is that the configure should produce a Makefile so that I can run make, but it didn't. Perhaps because it ran in to some errors.

Angus_D · Nov 24, 2001, 04:05 AM

You might like to read the autoconf and automake documentation.
autoconf is included as standard with OS X, and the documentation is here:
file:///Developer/Documentation/Commands/autoconf/autoconf_toc.html
automake is not included with OS X at this time (I think it might be in the future, though). you can install it via Fink, and the documentation is available here: http://www.gnu.org/manual/automake-1.5/automake.html

A later version of autoconf is available via Fink, and the latest manual is available here: http://www.gnu.org/manual/autoconf-2.52/autoconf.html

It is difficult to tell you how to port things, because it varies so much from package to package.