Mac version?

[Nguyen Pham]

Hi Muller,

If I remember correctly once you said you have been working on a "native" version xboard for Mac. Is there any update information? Thanks

[H.G.Muller]

I have no Mac, and I only assisted a person that wanted to work on this. And then the person disappeared...

So, no, we are back to square e2!

Actually it is not that hopeless; I did a rewrite of the XBopard front-end, with the aim to make most of it disappear, and become back-end. Se only very little platform-dependent code is left, which should make porting really easy. (In fact we used this to port to the GTK widget set.) Especially if you port to a Unix-like platform, so that it is really only the graphics front-end that has to be changed, and code for setting up processes and pipes can be used unmodified.

But no matter how small a job it is, without anyone involved that actually has a Mac, progress will be made at a speed of exactly zero.

[Nguyen Pham]

Thanks for information. It seems hopeless (for Mac version) if we all just sit to wait others.
Are you publishing your working project? Say, using GitHub?
If yes, we can look into your code, learn in advance and may help to contribute soon. Otherwise, we have to wait until your first official release.
Do you have any plan, date to release?

[H.G.Muller]

The source code is published on the GNU Savannah website ( http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/xboard ).

I also push a copy of most of my projects to my on-line git repository, at http://hgm.nubati.net/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi , which sometimes is more recent (or contains branches that are more recent), but not final.

We don't have any plans, but release if the code seems ready for it. Once every month we do a so-called developer release of the code in the master branch. Occasionally we split of a new fork, (most recently v4.7.x), which then will only accumulate bug fixes, but no new features. From these branches we do the official releases.

The front-ends are in the directories xaw, gtk and and winboard of the source tree. The winboard directory is still the old WinBoard front-end. The other two are based on the unified front end, which has most of the code moved to files menus.c, dialogs.c, draw.c (using the cairo graphics library; I don't know if that will have to be replaced by native Mac stuff) and usystem.c (for non-graphics unix stuff).

The front-end is based on the table-driven dialog creator GenericPopUp() in xoptions.c, which will be the main thing that has to be ported.

[Josh Pettus]

There really shouldn't be many code changes for menus and the like. GTK exists for OSX which uses the native quartz backend.
http://www.gtk.org/download/macos.php
So the hard work should be done
Louis Zoulli on the talkchess forums said it could be compiled but I'm not sure of the process how.
Right now i'm using gtk+x11 which works just fine as I am use doing everything through darwin.

I guess all that really needs to be done to make it an actual native app is a minor rearrangement of how xboard behaves, where its looking for data files, where it saves data files and the like.

Apple apps are self-contained folders that contain all libraries and supporting files for the program inside plus the executable. Its save files are usually somewhere in the users home directory/ library/ application support/. I guess, someone would have to create an xcode project ,apples development environment, and generate the cairo and gtk libraries in the native .framework format (though .dylibs can work) too.

[cavendish]

homebrew(brew) could install xboard 4.7.0 and fairymax 4.8S now. But they are built from source, you need to have compiler on your machine. Maybe brew could provide bottle(pre-build) releases in the future.)

[Josh Pettus]

well getting xcode isn't the hassle it use to be and is easily available on the app store. but hey if its possible why not?

[cavendish]

BTW, current solution in homebrew, gtk was built with x11.

And I tried to google and asked in irc.gnome.org/#gtk+ how to build gtk-osx(without x11), it looks like not an easy task. I don't have time recently to try it to make a bundle for xboard 4.7.x with gtk-osx. But here is some materials which are useful for this topic.

https://live.gnome.org/GTK+/OSX/

[Josh Pettus]

in macports its simple to install the gtk version of cairo and librsvg without the need for x11. Just add "variant gtk" each of thoes ports have a gtk version. And there is another variant for the the gtk without x11 already set up. After that a simple compile of xboard gtk will not need x11

[cavendish]

Yes, the "no_x11" option for gtk is very good here.

https://trac.macports.org/browser/trunk ... 2/Portfile

But I am not using macports, maybe someone could port my formula for xboard & fairymax to macports. It should be much easier than porting gtk no_x11 to homebrew.