RE: [ECOS] TUI: PDCurses for eCOS

[Steven Clugston <steven dot clugston at newcastle dot ac dot uk>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ecos-discuss-owner@ecos.sourceware.org
> [mailto:ecos-discuss-owner@ecos.sourceware.org] On Behalf Of
> Sergei Gavrikov
> Sent: 24 March 2009 00:23
> To: eCos discuss list
> Subject: [ECOS] TUI: PDCurses for eCOS
>
>
> Hi
>
> Last weekend I've done a port of PDCurses for ECOS. The whole
> curses library built for for ARM-7 is
>
> ~/PDCurses-3.4/ecos$ arm-eabi-size -t libpdcurses.a
>    text          data     bss     dec     hex filename
>    1052             0       0    1052     41c addch.o (ex
> libpdcurses.a)
>
> [snip]
>
>   42437           176    6731   49344    c0c0 (TOTALS)
>
> The PDCurses <http://pdcurses.sourceforge.net> sources are
> the very portable. I found what it's code is very compact and
> very qualitative. Compiling with -Wall produces no warnings.
> No need to mess up with the PDCurses core to port it for new
> OS.  When I started the port, I found and again re-read
> Peter's Seebach article: Porting a screen-management utility
> to eCos on IBM developerWorks
>
> http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-tams3/
>
> Read the last sentence of the Peter's article, please. If I
> wrote about the PDCurses + eCos, I would resume that like
> Peter said, Executable size is unbeatable; the whole
> application is _140_KB, including kernel, drivers, curses,
> etc. And yet another important thing: I did no dance with the
> PDCurses sources like Peter did with the OpenBSD curses.
>
> I would not believe in the said the above if I could not run
> a `size' for the got executables just now (built for RAM
> startup, stripped)
>
> ~/PDCurses-3.4/ecos$ arm-eabi-size firework newdemo ptest
> rain testcurs worm xmas
>    text          data     bss     dec     hex filename
>   62612          1376   24864   88852   15b14 firework
>   67852          1456   24856   94164   16fd4 newdemo
>   66648          1368   23752   91768   16678 ptest
>   62772          1356   24796   88924   15b5c rain
>   96956          1460   24748  123164   1e11c testcurs
>   67348          1396   25404   94148   16fc4 worm
>   69852          1348   21852   93052   16b7c xmas
>
> Those are real working demos built for my target (BTW,
> `testcurs' is the 1K lines written in curses). They all work
> very smoothly, 3 colour worms creep, aa-xmas card greets me,
> it fireworks, it rains, and `testcurs' and other demos learn
> me :-) Many thanks to William McBrine for the PDCurses!
>
> And what's about a fly in the ointment? malloc, calloc, free
> and curses event loop.
>
> If anyone will want to try the port, I attached it. To build
> the port, download the latest PDCurses 3.4 sources from SF.
> Build the demos for x11 or sdl1 to taste a honey. Unpack
> `pdcecos.tar.gz' under PDCurses-3.4 tree then and follow the
> instructions in the ecos/README* files.
>
> Notes: 1) The port was tested on Linux Ubuntu 8.04 with
> Olimex LPC-E2294 board using `minicom' communication program.
> 2) I never wrote in curses, but I used `whiptail' a while
> ago, so, I won't help you on curses. 3) the port is two-days
> `weekend mechanics', so, it may be not ideal, it was my first
> look on PDCurses. 4) I do not know much about this remark
> from PDCurses's README
>
> ---->8
> The core package is in the public domain, but small portions
> of PDCurses are subject to copyright under various licenses.
> Each directory contains a README file, with a section titled
> "Distribution Status" which describes the status of the files
> in that directory.
> ---->8
>
> So, I can not answer on Q: Is it possible to enter PDCurses
> in eCos CVS tree?
>
> In any case I think that PDCurses can be the very useful
> library to build the excellent TUIs under eCos.
>
> That's it.
>
> Regards,
>
> Sergei
>

Thanks for this Sergei.

I've been wanting to do a port of a minimal console text editor something like nano or pico to eCos to do on board editing of configuration files to be storred in flash. I've not had time to look into it yet, but as nano (as far as I remember) uses ncurses, this might be just the thing to get the ball rolling.

Regards,

Steven

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