easy contribution opportunity: FreeType port to BeOS

[Ingo Weinhold]

On 2008-03-12 at 09:16:27 [+0100], Andrew Bachmann <andrewbachmann at gmail.com> 
wrote:
> 
> We need a FreeType port for BeOS, of at least version 2.3.0.  In particular,
> we need the headers and the libraries.  The openjdk build checks for the
> presence of the freetype library by trying to build a small program that
> uses the ftbuild.h header and also the library.  This happens before the
> build gets going.  Although we could comment out the check, I think we
> should just address this need.
> 
> This would be a nice opportunity for someone to make a contribution to help
> the Haiku port.  I'm supposing this should be pretty easy, but I haven't
> tried.  If you are intending to do this, please post to the list so others
> don't duplicate your contribution.  It's up to whoever builds it but I would
> recommend that the port be posted to BeBits for posterity.

Haiku does already use FreeType 2.3.5. According to its Jamfile building for 
BeOS should be supported, too.

Anyway, since the target of the OpenJDK is Haiku I'd recommend giving 
developing under Haiku a try, if you can. My experiences with working on Perl 
are pretty positive so far. There are a lot of little annoyances (e.g. 
scrolling in Pe is a bit broken), but in general things work quite well. I 
use a second partition on which the work is located, so the Haiku 
installation can be updated without problems. Regular backups of the work are 
of course advisable, though so far I haven't had the need to restore any. I 
have this setup for both real hardware and VMware, but lately I'm mainly 
using VMware. The performance is OK and the turn-around times when debugging 
a Haiku problem are way shorter.

CU, Ingo