Re: ferret on an Apple G3

[Glenn Carver <Glenn.Carver@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 4:27 pm +0100 8/9/99, Steve Hankin wrote:

>As far as we know, noone has actually done the port to the G3 Mac, either
>under MacOS or under Linux.

I was quite interested in having a crack at a MacOS port and got more
involved in the source code in trying to get Ferret5 working on Solaris2.5.
I didn't look deeply at the code but it was clear that some items would
port very easily whereas others would be a major headache, such as the GUI
which would need designing from scratch and the graphics and output. I
can't remember but I don't think netCDF/HDF is available for the Mac.
Implementing external functions on the Mac would take some thinking about.
I decided a MacOS port would involve a huge amount of effort but would be a
great learning experience best let to a team rather than an individual.

>Under Linux the issues will be
>
>  1. the availability of the support libraries (netCDF, HDF)
>  2. the availability of a FORTRAN compiler

It wasn't clear to me whether the original question referred to Linux on
win32 hardware or LinuxPPC (ie. mac hardware). The latter would probably be
more difficult due to lack of supporting software.

>Under MacOS, we put some time into this about 5 years ago. We actually
>had a working version of Ferret -- but the interface was too un-Mac to
>distribute it. The problems on MacOS back then were:
>
>  1. no Unix system call support or Xlib so the XGKS package wouldn't
>     port

Things are certainly changing. MacOS X (released mainly as a server OS) has
a BSD kernel base and may well make things easier to port. However, most
desktops still use MacOS 8 (soon to be 9).

>  2. we found no other GKS library available on the Mac

Have you ever considered moving to OpenGL in the future for Ferret? As well
as being supported widely in the Unix world, Apple recently endorsed OpenGL.

>  3. very poor command line input support from the OS

Quite right too!


My 2p worth.

       Glenn


----
Dr. Glenn Carver, Senior Research Associate,
Centre for Atmospheric Science, Chemistry Dept., Cambridge University, UK
mailto:Glenn.Carver@atm.ch.cam.ac.uk   http://www.atm.ch.cam.ac.uk/~glenn/

              "I never think of the future, it comes soon enough"
                   - Albert Einstein