Re: irfanview to port over to linux

On Friday 05 November 2004 02:06 pm, mike hoy wrote:
> Are any of you pluggers familiar with IrfanView? It's
> a small graphics program currently only available on
> windows. Well since I recently switched over to Linux
> I wanted my irfan view back. But it wasn't available
> in linux so I emailed the developer and he says.
> 'porting can be difficult'. Basically he is interested
> in making a linux version but has some general
> questions and I'm sure eventually some very technical
> questions.

Not trying to shoot down your idea, but the IrfanView author is 100% right;
porting applications to be cross platform can be exceedingly difficult if the
app wasn't written to be xplatform in the first place. It all depends on how
OS-specific the original code is. Any program having anything to do with
graphics tend to be *very* OS-specific.

Now if he wrote IrfanView using mostly pure C/C++ (with no Win extensions) and
all of his sublibraries are also written in some pure (or close to pure)
language, then it might be doable. I doubt it since it's dealing with image
manipulations which normally means using lots of OS-specific image writing
calls.

Now if he's serious about attempting a port, then any decent LUG should be
able to help him out with specific questions. I wouldn't expect that he'd
get *any* direct help (contributing code) since IrfanView isn't Open Source
and not too many people will work on non-Open Source projects without getting
paid.

Your best bet might be to run IrfanView in wine and see if it works...

Kurt
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