This is a fork of: https://github.com/windoze/tvision
Intents:
- Keep it as simple as possible, with not a lot of dependencies.
- Multiplatform (Linux and Windows at begin)
Hi!
The small sections are:
- Ultra quick instructions
- Introduction
- Notes about the package
- Compilation and installation
- Using the library to compile your program
- Linux/UNIX dynamic libraries
- Libraries and tools needed
- Examples
- Dialog editor
- Targets supported, limitations
- CPU usage
- Notes about international support
- How to submit a patch
- Memory Debuggers
- Special thanks
- Contact information
The instructions to compile the source code can be found in the INSTALL.txt file. I strongly suggest reading the INSTALL.txt file and the files indicated by it.
- Ultra quick instructions
If you can't wait even a second and you are running a UNIX like system with most of the GNU tools (Perl, shell utils, file utils, bash, make, etc.) you can just follow these steps: [These tools are installed in all Linux systems; they are available for most UNIX systems and also for djgpp, Cygwin and MinGW]
A) Run the configure script (./configure or configure).
Examples: linux:/usr/src/tvision# ./configure c:\djgpp\contrib\tvision>configure
B) If all is OK run "make". C) If all is OK just run "make install". [On UNIX systems you'll need to change to the root user before installing]
With it you'll get the headers and library installed. If the installation prefix directory is wrongly guessed call the configure script passing --prefix=dir as argument. Example: linux:/usr/src/tvision# ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
Note: The configuration mechanism can be used for Cygwin or MinGW but you must install some GNU tools. It can't be used for Borland and Microsoft compilers.
- Introduction:
That's the Turbo Vision distribution (TV for short) v@version@. The sources are copyrighted by Borland (currently Inprise) and are freely available in internet from:
ftp://ftp.inprise.com/pub/borlandcpp/devsupport/archive/turbovision/tv.zip
Look in the borland.txt file for more information. Additionally here is what Inprise says about this package:
URL: http://www.inprise.com/devsupport/bcppbuilder/faq/QNA906.html or: http://community.borland.com/article/0,1410,17285,00.html
Question and Answer Database
QNA :Turbo Vision Category :C/C++ Language Issues Platform :Windows95 Product :C++Builder ALL
Question: Where can I find the public domain version of Turbo Vision?
Answer: It can be found at ftp.inprise.com/pub/borlandcpp/devsupport/archive/turbovision/
the turbo vision libraries are in the tv.zip archve, the rest of the files are examples.
So according to Inprise web tv.zip is a Public Domain version. I added this small text because some people have doubts about copyrights issues.
They were heavily patched to work with gcc, BC++ and MSVC. Some patches fixes bugs, others changes the behavior of things limited to 16 bits values and others add brand new functionality. The resulting TV isn't 100% compatible with the original. See the examples/porting.txt file for more information, I explain which differences I found while porting the examples. Up to release 1.0.1 most of the patches were made by Robert Hoehne. I contributed with various patches and modules mainly to extend the original functionality. For information about what changed before it just read the change.log and change1.log files. You'll find more information in the "doc" directory. The library is distributed under the GPL license, it seems to be OK because according to a FAQ in the Inprise web site the base library is Public Domain. The file "copying" contains the GPL license and the file "copying.rh" contains the RHIDE copyright. Some portions of the contributed code are under the BSD license (QNX RtP driver). I took some code from the Sigala's port of TV (some examples), Sigala's port is under the BSD license, but I modified the code and my changes are covered by the GPL license. If you want the code under BSD look for Sigala's port. I also added some code from TV Tools, this package was created by Marc Stern [email protected] and he states: "You can freely distribute them, modify them and use them for any purpose (even include it into commercial products).". For the purpose of this distribution the code is under GPL license.
Recent news: Richard M. Stallman contacted me and put some doubts about the distribution of Borland's sources, he contacted somebody at Borland asking if TV was freesoftware and he got no as answer. I think this reply was mainly because RMS asked without clarifying your point. To clarify it I contacted the person in charge of the Linux web section of Borland and he told me that he is redirecting these doubts to the right people inside Borland. Until now I didn't get a final answer. Note it was in 2000, Borland never replied and I insisted during 18 months. Also note that I tried to contact Linux International but they never replied.
- Notes about the package:
As you are reading it you already unpacked it but here are some notes: (I usually read the readmes without unpacking) The distribution is done using two formats: .zip and .tar.gz. The .zip file contains the files in "DOS" format (\r\n as end of line) and the .tar.gz file contains the same files in "UNIX" format (\n as end of line). The .zip file also lacks a few files needed to create Debian packages because these files have names that can't be safetly used in environments where the file names are limited to 8+3 characters. If you use the .tar.gz file for a system like djgpp (DOS) you can use the file lista.dos to know which files should be converted to DOS format. The script called fromunix.pl converts those files. The rest of the file doesn't usually need any change because gcc understands both kind of end of line terminators. I don't know if bcc and msvc also supports it. Note that sometimes I talk about "Linux" but it usually applies to most POSIX systems. Also note that Cygwin is more similar to Linux than DOS. Starting with 1.0.5 I include the Debian package files. As these files aren't 8+3 clean if you uncompress the files in plain DOS you'll get some warnings about files with the same name, so I removed these files from the DOS distribution in 1.0.6, now they are only in the Linux distribution. So if you want to try generating the .deb packages you must have the Linux distribution of the library. The compress and compress.bat files are used to create the distribution packages and are included. If you need to generate the .zip file just use the files in the djgpp directory. If you need to generate the .tar.gz just use the files in the linux directory. Starting with 1.1.0 Win32 platforms are also supported using MingW and BC++ 5.5 compilers. In 2.0.0 we added MSVC and QNX support. The UNIX support was also enhanced to support FreeBSD and Solaris. Starting with 2.0.2 the make process is unified and the resulting library is generated in the makes directory for all architectures. Currently the only target that isn't integrated is MSVC because Microsoft doesn't provide a free compiler like Borland does. I need volunteers to integrate the MSVC to the rest and make things easier for MSVC users. For more information read the INSTALL.txt file.
- Compilation and installation:
The compilation instructions are in the INSTALL.txt file. All the .o/.obj files are stored in the makes/obj directory it helps to delete or compress these files if you want to save disk space and you won't be modifying the sources all the time. The generated library/ies can be found in the makes directory.
The systems using gcc and UNIX tools can install the library/ies using:
$ make install
If it fails or you are using another compiler you can install it by hand or
use the library without installing:
To use the library add the include directory in your includes path and the
directory where the library was created to your libraries path (or just move
the library to the lib directory). I recommend using an environment variable
pointing to the base directory where the files are located and add the rest
to it. For example:
TVISION=e:/dj/contrib/tvision
Then
- Using the library to compile your program:
In order to compile your program you'll have to set your compiler to search the header files in the directory where the Turbo Vision are installed. This is usually achieved using the -I command option. Here is an example: suppose the prefix is /usr/local then the headers will be installed to /usr/local/include/rhtvision So you'll have to use -I/usr/local/include/rhtvision as command line option for the compiler. All TV programs includes tv.h header and no other headers. To avoid pulling a huge header and a lot of definitions TV have a "request" system. Suppose you want to use the TView class, then you add to your source code:
#define Uses_TView #include <tv.h>
Take a look at the examples and tutorial to see real word examples. The point is that you never do things like:
#include <tv/view.h>
This works, but could change in the future. If you want to make your application more portable include the standard C headers using definitions like Uses_stdio. This will save time because the header will be included just once (the library could need to request it from its own headers) and will solve some portability problems. To learn more about read the include/compatlayer.h file and take a look at the files located in the compat directory. In order to link your TV application you'll have to provide the name of the library and the path where the library is installed. To simplify the above mentioned task the library provides a small program called "rhtv-config". This program can be used to know the paths from a script or makefile. Running the program without arguments will print the usage information. Here is an example for a POSIX shell and the gcc compiler:
$ gcc -o tv_logo rhtv-config --include tv_logo.cc rhtv-config --dir-libs rhtv-config --dlibs
It compiles one of the example found in the examples/desklogo directory. For those not familiar with the above syntaxis: the reverse quotes are used to execute a program and replace the text with the output of the executed command. For the example I used for the include directory it means that:
$ gcc -o tv_logo rhtv-config --include
Is equivalent to:
$ gcc -o tv_logo -I/usr/local/include/rhtvision
Currently it works only for systems using gcc. If you are interested in applying this concept to other of the supported compilers consider helping me with some information and tests. Note the tool supports a switch for dynamic linking and static linking. Currently static linking really means "link statically with TV and dynamically with the rest of libraries". This is just to allow users to distribute programs that doesn't need downloading TV itselft. Also note that when linking dynamically you only have to indicate rhtv library, that's because the library was linked providing its dependencies, but when you link statically you have to list all the dependencies, sometimes this is long. In my Linux system it the list of dependencies is: -lstdc++ -lncurses -lm -lgpm -lX11 -lXmu
- Linux/UNIX dynamic libraries:
The configure/make process generates it. My tests shows that a small TV example (examples/dyntxt) is only 14Kb long when linked dynamically and without debug information. But you should know that dynamically linked executables are slower than static ones, specially when you call a lot of small and fast library functions, that's because the address resolution overhead.
- Libraries needed:
Consult the doc/install/tools.txt file.
- Examples:
I included a collection of over than 13 examples I got from the net and ported to this TV. The examples are shipped only with the sources distribution. See the examples directory for more information. For targets using the gcc compiler you can run:
$ make examples
To compile all examples. You can also make any of the examples by changing to the example/example_name directory and running:
$ make -f name_of_the_example.mkf
If you are using Borland tools you must use:
make -f name_of_the_example.bmk
Currently Microsoft's nmake is not supported. Please contact me if you know about the MSVC command line usage and want to help with it.
- Dialog Editor:
In the examples directory you'll find a directory called dlgdsn. This directory contains sources for a dialog editor. It was created by Warlei Alves and he asked me to maintain it. Right now I'm just including it in the package and adapted it to compile with the last release of TV. I also made it work under DOS and not only Linux. If enough people gets interested I think we can do a good tool from it, but as I use EasyDiag (a library to easilly generate dialogs) I don't have much interest on fixing all the bugs in the dialog editor.
- Targets supported, limitations:
The library compiles and runs in FreeBSD, DOS, Linux, QNX, Solaris and Win32 systems. Only i386 is fully tested, but the code also works for Alpha, ARM, HPPA, Itanium, Power PC and SPARC; we need volunteers to deeply test those platforms. The demo program compiles for all the mentioned architectures but I think there are some endian details that must be solved, I fixed the ones that were visible. Joel Soete reported some success using Linux+HPPA+gcc 3.0. All the other were tested using remote machines found in the Source Forge's compiler farm and H.P. Test Drive. Starting with TV 2.0.0 we use the concept of drivers. Most drivers have documentation in the doc directory explaining their limitations and configuration options.
- CPU usage:
Since v1.0.8 the TProgram::idle() member releases the CPU to the OS. If for some reason you want to eat 100% of the CPU or you want to use a methode different than the used by this function just set TProgram::doNotReleaseCPU to 1 and the class won't release the CPU. For Linux I just do a usleep(10), that's sleep for 10 micro s. For djgpp I call to the __dpmi_yield() function. Note that you could use usleep for both (DOS and Linux) but in this case you should sleep for more than 18.2 ms to let djgpp's sleep really release the CPU. I think is easier to just call __dpmi_yield() and explicitly release the CPU, in this way you sleep the minimal amount of time.
- Notes about international support:
The configuration script detects if the internationalization support is available in your system. For Linux that's part of the standard C library and all is provided as dynamic libraries so it doesn't impact the memory usage. For DOS that's provided by the gettext package (gtxtXXXb.zip). Versions of gettext prior to 0.10.37 are relative small and I think the memory used by it is OK and you should try to use it. Since 0.10.37 libintl.a recodes the strings on the fly, for that it needs libiconv (licvXXb.zip). This library is a huge set of conversion tables, those tables include chinese, japanese and korean codes, it makes the tables really huge and the size of programs linked with it increases more than 800 Kb (more than 600 Kb using UPX). In this case you could: a) Just use an old version of gettext, very recommendable. b) Generate programs with international support only when really needed. If you choose the second option you must configure the library to use international support. I provide a dummy international library. This library provides the functions that gettext provides but they do nothing. Why? What is the purpose? By doing it if you don't have international support at configuration time but you install it latter no recompilation is needed. You can also configure with international support and then create applications without it just linking with this library. Additionally you can configure the library to use the dummy version even if gettext is installed (--force-dummy), that's a good option if you only need to create a few applications with international support. This library is compiled and installed with the libtvfintl.a name. If you don't have international support or want to disable it to reduce the size of a particular application you must link with this library If you want to disable the fake library and all the internationalization support use the --no-intl configuration option. Note: Turbo Vision have its own recoding facilities so you don't need libiconv.
- How to submit a patch:
The simplest way is running a diff between your current directory and a copy of the library as you downloaded it. Don't forget to specify the exact version of the distribution and the purpose of the patchs. Use the unified mode (-u), this mode is the best for humans ;-)
- Memory Debuggers:
The library supports the MSS memory debugger version 1.2.1 for DOS. The code have special provisions to workaround some limitations in MSS. To use it just configure the library using the --with-mss option. You'll need to link with the mss library as explained in the mss documentation and as shown in the examples. MSS should work for Linux but I didn't test it. If you know about other memory debugger and you need to introduce some changes in the library contact me.
- Special thanks:
They goes to the people listed in THANKS file. If I omitted you please let me know.
- Contact information:
Salvador E. Tropea (SET) Curapaligue 2124 3 de Febrero, Caseros (1678) Bs.As. Argentina
Phone: (+5411) 4759-0013
e-mail: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] http: www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Vista/6552/ www.geocities.com/set-soft/ (alias of the above mentioned)
Enjoy, SET