Reimplementing would be a better approach than trying to port it. SOM3 was never finished, so that's a wash... which is too bad, because that was the one that was going to allow developers to move WPS applications to their own processes while still retaining wps communication with the second instance of pmshell.exe (which is the one that runs the WPS). The current implementation of the WPS uses SOM2, which means that if you want to write a WPS application you will write a .dll file which gets hooked into pmshell.exe and runs as a thread. This makes debugging a bastard and also means that if you load bad pointers you can scribble all over the inside of pmshell.

Hmmm... just occurred to me some of you might not be too aware of how it works in OS/2 land. PM handles the graphics primitives, low level device management, and memory management, while WPS handles the objects. They are both implemented in a program called pmshell.exe. The first time it runs (this is controlled by the PROTSHELL= statement in the config.sys it checks if another copy is running, sees that one isn't, and initiates Presentation Manager. The second time it runs (controlled by the RUNWORKPLACE= line in the config.sys) it checks, sees another instance is running, and uses its services to set up the desktop. When you're booting an OS/2 system, you'll see the screen flip into graphics mode, and a smooth blue background appear. That's PM starting. Then, you'll hear the destop startup sound, and the desktop will open up. That's the second instance starting the WPS.

Anyway... X could probably make a good framework for such a reimplementation. However, it would take a LOT of work to get it right. It would first be necessary to create the object framework, and then to write an application that could use it to create a desktop, using Xs services to do so. In order to really get something that would work well, I think you'd have to have a good threading kernel. Linux is starting to take some real strides in this direction, but until its at a production quality, trying to do this will result in something that will be slooooow. I have to admit I was very disappointed by KDE and Gnome. I hoped that one of these projects would create a worthy WPS successor, at which point I'd have been quite happy to head on over. However, neither of them even come close. I think that the people that like to develop such things could do a lot worse than spend a few months messing around with a well set up OS/2 system to soak up the ambience. Unfortunately, it mostly looks like they spent their time rehashing the broken version of a desktop implementation marketed by that company in Redmond.

--\n-------------------------------------------------------------------\n* Jack Troughton                            jake at consultron.ca *\n* [link|http://consultron.ca|http://consultron.ca]                   [link|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca] *\n* Laval Qu\ufffdbec Canada                   [link|news://news.consultron.ca|news://news.consultron.ca] *\n-------------------------------------------------------------------