Section 2.7. Summary

2.7. Summary

Using the assessment questionnaire presented in Chapter 1, you should now have a better understanding of the tasks ahead. You may have also noticed that the development environment on Linux is similar to development environments on UNIX platforms. This makes developing or porting applications to Linux a familiar experience to any software developer or porting engineer. Linux comes with a full set of development tools that makes the development and porting experience straightforward:

• Compilers available today in Linux adhere to the same set of standards that compilers from UNIX platforms adhere to. Although not all applications to be ported are expected to be 100 percent portable, many parts of the application that adhere to standards can be easily ported using compilers available on Linux.

• The GNU binutils distribution provides porting engineers with all the utilities needed when porting applications to Linux. These tools are standard in all Linux distributions and are compatible with tools from other platforms. This is especially true of tools such as size, nm, ranlib, and ar.

• Ever since the first version of the Java Development Kit was released, Linux developers have kept pace with the Java community to make available a version of Java for Linux. Today, different JDKs that work on Linux are available from different UNIX vendors.

• The packaging environment available in Linux provides application developers and porting engineers an easy environment to package their applications with. It is well documented and supported by the open-source community.

• Creating an overall project plan is also part of the scoping step. Feed information back to the project manager so that tasks, deliverables, success criteria, schedules, resources and dependencies can be discussed and communicated to all members of the porting project.

In the next chapter, we discuss the analysis step of the porting process from the porting personnel point of view. We begin to analyze the application deeper and start to figure out the level of work that needs to be done to port the application. In so doing, the tasks associated with each deliverable are refined and adjusted as necessary.