[oss-devel] Possible projects for contributors : (even Windows might be possible)

[timothy at farrarfocus.com]

Franois,

> You mean to help porting *nix apps to win ?
> isn't there already some kind of OSS emulation in cygwin ?

Good point, I didn't even consider this. However looks as if cygwin's OSS 
emulation is very behind, only old /dev/dsp stuff I think without any OSS 
v4.0 stuff. However, one serious problem with cygwin is that it isn't 
compatible with any proprietary software, for example no staticly linking 
with the cygwin library for instance with out releasing your source 
code... Details, http://cygwin.com/license.html

The License with MSYS (MinGW) is ok, however I don't believe they have or 
want OSS support given that it is designed for using compilier tools only.

Yair,

The libossaudio soundcard.h does "#define ioctl _oss_ioctl", so on BSDs 
after including soundcard.h all ioctl()s are routing through libossaudio, 
which seems a little "hackish". On Windows if you did this you would have 
to emulate the standard c open/close/read/write stuff, in select() would 
have to emulate calls to Windows Winsock, but I don't see any naming 
conflicts for poll/mmap/ioctl (could be wrong though).

However,

After reading both your comments, it seems as if what I am suggesting 
might not be that useful. Basically my suggestion boils down to a liboss 
on Mac and Windows which has, oss_write(), oss_read(), oss_select(), 
oss_poll(), oss_ioctl(), etc, but without any kind of "#define ioctl 
oss_ioctl()" stuff.

When it seems as if it would be better to have the following two options,

1.) OSS in cygwin or msys or perhaps some other "full" unix wrapper api 
for windows.

2.) Actual native OSS drivers to fully replace the Windows and Mac ones.

_
|imothy Farrar
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