Re: Port of Netsurf 3.9 to Plan 9

Hi Jonas,

Le 06/01/2020 à 16:38, Jonas a écrit :
> Dear Netsurf developers,
>
> I have started a port of Netsurf 3.9 to the operating system Plan 9
> (http://9front.org, https://9p.io/plan9). It uses the framebuffer
> frontend for now, but I plan to continue with a native frontend, also
> possibly with help from other developers.

Wow, nice to see NS ported to yet another platform :-)

> quality of the Netsurf source. Another obstacle is that most larger GNU
> development tools aren't available for Plan 9, no GCC for example. Plan
> 9 has its own C compiler (https://9p.io/sys/doc/compiler.html) that
> sometimes does things in different ways, and typically doesn't support
> GCC extensions and newer features added to the language lately.

Does it require C89 style (like, variables declared at beginning of block)?

For the Haiku ports I tried to maintain C89 code for a while for GCC
2.95, and if another platform requires it that'd be an incentive to fix
replicant support so we could put NS as a widget on the desktop…

> In the absence of GCC/Autotools/GNUmake and friends, I have written my
> own build system using Plan 9 'mk' (using 'mkfile'). I am aware that
> this makes a possible upstream integration of the port harder.

Well we don't use autotools anyway, we have custom makefiles used as a
buildsystem for all libraries:
http://git.netsurf-browser.org/buildsystem.git/

Maybe it's possible to isolate the incompatible parts from it and
reimplement them for other make engines?

I once managed to write a simple makefile engine for both GNU make and
MS Nmake that accepted unchanged makefiles with only declarative stuff:
http://miniserve.defence-force.org/svn/users/mmu_man/sdk-makefile-engine/make/

> Alternative routes would have been making GCC work on plan 9---some work
> has been done on this (https://harvey-os.org), or to try to generate
> plan 9 binaries from Linux using cross compilation. Both ways would be a
> lot of compiler development work, and I am quite sure that the plan 9

Well for continuous integration we might want to do that anyway. But if
you went this far without changing code it can probably be fixed.

> I started with the source tree of Netsurf 3.9, downloading all all
> support libraries separately (that is why they have version numbers in
> the directories). I have not deleted any files, only added files and
> changed files. All files 'xxx.y' that I changed are backed up as
> 'orig_xxx.y' making it easier to 'diff' against the original. I got the
> tip that it might be a good idea to make a clone of the official Git
> repository and applying the diffs against it, in which case the 'orig_'
> files won't be necessary, and a possible merger maybe easier to do in


Indeed, it's usually better to work on the HEAD. And with git you can
rebase your changes from time to time, with git resolving most of the
conflicts itself.

I believe you should already have a git client:
https://hub.packtpub.com/introducing-git-fs-a-native-git-client-for-plan-9/

It might also be possible to build some simple client like this one
using libgit2:
https://github.com/sba1/simplegit


François.