Bounty proposal: RISC OS frontend support for Netsurf

Hi everyone,

I read the following blog posting from Vincent Sanders over the weekend, concerning the latest Netsurf developers weekend. I was struck by this excerpt:

We discussed some ways to encourage new developers and try and get committed developers especially for the minority platform frontends. The RISC OS frontend for example has needed a maintainer since the previous one stepped down. There was some initial response from its community, culminating in a total of two patches, when we announced the port was under threat of not being releasable in future. Unfortunately nothing further came from this and it appears our oldest frontend may soon become part of our history.

I’m aware this has been a situation for some time. If nobody can offer free time to maintain the frontend, would a bounty induce someone to come forward and perform the work necessary to bring the frontend up to date? Otherwise, Netsurf will go forth on other platforms, to our detriment.

The long term problem of maintaining the front end may be easier to meet, if there is less of a mountain to climb to start with?

Hope springs eternal.

Steve Scott

Hi,

are there open issues or missing features in the RISC OS frontend? If so, what are they?

Christian Walther

You should be able to find out more at:
http://www.netsurf-browser.org/
The bug tracker lists 4 RISC OS issues:
http://bugs.netsurf-browser.org/mantis/my_view_page.php

Though reading “Netsurf developers weekend” suggests there are more things to do. If anyone can help I’m sure they’d love to hear from you.

Me?
I’d love too, but since I just started to get my hands dirty with RISC OS programming I doubt that I’d be a good fit for a project like NetSurf. ;)

I read the bug tracker a few days ago, but Stephen posts suggested that there are more problems with the RISC OS port than the bug tracker states, and I was just curious.

It would be really sad if RISC OS support would be dropped from NetSurf.

Are the two guys who had a go at getting the development environment running a few months ago still around? I’m just wondering what their experiences were and whether they gave up through lack of time or because of other issues like the learning curve of RISC OS Wimp programming?

I have had a go at getting it up and running a few months back – generally it was quite a positive experience, though I seem to remember hitting some issues with regard to documentation not being fully up to date (or something like that – I don’t recall exactly).

I used Linux Mint as a development machine and was able to cross-compile to RISC OS and fix a very very minor bug.

My intention back then was to become a NetSurf developer for RISC OS but a new job and family commitments mean that I simply don’t have the time…I would like to look at this again in the future but am concerned if I say “Yes I’ll look at it” then it will put off someone who may have more time than I do so for now I’ll say “No, count me out”

Glen: good to know it was generally positive. I hope another maintainer will be found. It’s difficult when there are so few RISC OS developers around anyway. There are undoubtedly people with the right skills but usually they are fully occupied maintaining other software already.

Has it really been over a year…?

Did anyone else take up the challenge?

I feel I should get off my backside and help out a bit more.

If these posts really were in 2015 and I’m not going crazy then my “new job” I was referring to back then has since turned into “another new job” which only lasted about 8 months (the company faced issues so I jumped before the axe fell) and I’m now going to be working for “yet another new job”!

All of this doesn’t give me any more time though…

I have an laptop from a couple of years ago that I plan to fix (needs a new motherboard) and turn into a Linux development machine (my “yet another new job” uses Windows unfortunately) so once thats up and running I’ll give NetSurf another go – but if anyone else is working on it I’d love to hear more!

To the best of my knowledge, no one is currently working on NetSurf’s RISC OS front-end. From the mailing list it looks like there’s quite a bit of work going on with the main browser code, so I’m sure a RISC OS maintainer coming forward would be much appreciated!

Someone has taken up the challenge. AIUI he was contributing more than any other maintainer! I know he is shortly due to move house and may currently not be so active. Actually looking at the mailing list it appears things have been rather quite for about six months on all fronts.

OK, that’s good news. I’d read this on the mailing list and assumed there wasn’t an active RISC OS maintainer. Of course, I don’t think there’s any reason why there couldn’t be more than one.

If it hasn’t been already been done – Netsurf searching ‘Google groups’ – would be handy.

“Someone has taken up the challenge. AIUI he was contributing more than any other maintainer!”

Err, who? This is news to me. Nobody has touched the RISC OS front end in months and months and months.

Rob, have you guys moved on from IRC (as documented on the NS web site) to some other communication medium? When I log in to #netsurf, I see lots of attendees and no chat. I gave up logging in as it looked like everyone had lost interest. I’ve been logged in for about 45 mins now – and nothing.

That having been said, I’m aware that new versions of NS have been appearing recently.

I was meaning a year or so ago. According to the link above it appears very little has been happening full stop i.e. no posts at all in June or July! Your posting suggests otherwise which I’m glad to hear.

I’ve been talking to a couple of the core devs on IRC this evening, and I’ve got a (dauntingly large) assignment. Well, I foolishly assigned it to myself.

Dave: We’re still on IRC on Freenode. We mostly talk in mid-afternoon and early evening.
Chris; Nope, last person to do any work on RISC OS NetSurf was Steve Fryatt, in 2014, according to our version control.

Plenty of under-the-hood improvements have been made in the past months in the core.

Nope, last person to do any work on RISC OS NetSurf was Steve Fryatt, in 2014, according to our version control.

I thought that Dave Higton had done some work in the past twelve to eighteen months?

Indeed I have, but the commits would have been done by other people.

I’ve just had a look through the logs and the last serious work done to the RISC OS front end was by Steve in 2013. Since then there have been bug fixes from various people and a bare minimum of work by the core developers to ensure that the RISC OS front end continues to build as the core is updated.

Dave: your work should be attributed to you. I can see some commits from you in the history:

• RISC OS commits before source tree shuffle
• RISC OS commits since source tree shuffle

I’ve been talking to a couple of the core devs on IRC this evening, and I’ve got a (dauntingly large) assignment

I’m a bit behind with my current set up but once I’m back up to speed with it all I’d be happy to help out too…will keep you posted as to my status either on here or through IRC/mailing list.

Realistically it’ll be 2017 before I’m in any kind of stable position to help out.

Hi,

I was able to set up a Linux cross compile environment. And I was able to compile Netsurf for RISC-OS. However I’m used to a Microsoft development environment. Can somebody give me some pointers how to develop for RISC-OS in particular Netsurf and perhaps Python ?.

Timo: I don’t think Python is involved at all. If you’re used to a Microsoft development environment, you could do worse than NFS/CIFS mounting your source checkout on your VM (assuming you’ve gone that route) and use any text editor you like (assuming it supports UNIX line endings.)

On the other hand, you may find learning the UNIX development environment very rewarding.

Hi Rob. I use a VM for me this a handy approach. I didn’t use Virtual Box from Oracle but Hyper-V but that works for compiling fine. So the idea is just share the directory with the sources and then use Visual Studio ?. Perhaps I could make a MS Windows front end ;-).

But can you give me some advise about debugging and an IDE in Linux ( perhaps eclipse ? ).

Yours,
Timo