[aprssig] aprx for windows?

[Matti Aarnio]

On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 11:01:16AM -0700, Bill V WA7NWP wrote:
> 
> Hello Matti,
> 
> I've been looking for a good 'small' Igate and digipeater to work on
> Windows with the BPQ32 network switch.   Maybe your program is a good
> solutions for this?   Since BPQ32 presents a virtual com port with
> KISS, will that allow connecting?

It could, in theory.   

In practice my code presumes UNIX runtime environment, but it should
be portable to Windows.  Even knowing that I used very dirty UNIX
tricks to make the APRSIS subsystem asynchronous of the main loop
of TNC KISS serial ports and such.

Now knowing things that are affected may be of some help.
Instead of fork() making two asynchronous copies communicating
over a socketpair(), a pthread could be created to run the APRSIS
communicator subsystem.  What needs asynchrony there is essentially
DNS resolving, and network connection setup work, otherwise that
APRSIS communication could be in same poll() switched main loop
as everything else.

I do suppose (not knowing really) that one needs some simple-ish
setup codes to run a software on Windows as headless service.
This one does not have any sort of gui for configuration or any
other purposes, which is also somewhat difficult in light of
Windows systems...

I am vaguely aware that Windows has a bunch of service functions that are
claimable as "POSIX services", but  fork()  is really not among them.
One subsystem needs to be re-engineered for that.

... but then my code works on Linux systems that have internal AX.25
network stack, and also on BSD systems without it.  It really is not
all that difficult an engineering job.

> I guess another issue is naming aliases and controlling digipeating
> between ports but I'll follow up on that if this is a potential win32
> application.

It should be portable, and I am willing to include necessary bits into
the code base for it to be compiled on windows, but I know nothing of
programming in that environment.  For that matter, I do not do GUI programs
on _any_ environment, only headless servers...
(and very lame web pages, observe http://ham.zmailer.org/oh2mqk/aprx/ )

> Thanks,
> Bill - WA7NWP

73 de Matti, OH2MQK