Re: [AD] Suggestions

[Laurence Withers <lwithers@xxxxxxxxxx>]

In reply to Robin Burrows <rburrows@xxxxxxxxxx>:
>Here are a few suggestions that have annoyed me about Allegro (excluding the
>8bit palette ;):

Regarding the 8-bit palette: I will be posting (hopefully within the
next few days) a utility + patch on my website which changes the Allegro
namespace (ie. prefixing of functions, etc). Part of this patch will be
to implement an 8-bit palette by default, with the 6-bit palette still
available in a parallel API.

>1: Change readme.dj, readme.mgw etc to readdj.txt, readmgw.txt etc. This is
>so you can doubleclick them to open in windows, at the moment they just
>don't look like textfiles to new users!

I would propose a minor reorganisation of the root directory; let's have
the usual README, INSTALL, FAQ, etc., with pointers to the platform
specific documentation (which should go into a subdirectory, such as
`building').

The FAQ in the root directory wouldn't be produced from faq._tx, but
would be a separate document. faq._tx should be about programming with
Allegro, FAQ should be about compiling Allegro.

I am happy to implement this change if others agree. Please improve upon
it :-)

>2: In the examples they have #include "allegro.h" which new allegrans just
>copy for their programmes and so copy the allegro.h to their current dir and
>have probelms when they get a new allegro. 

We could change this easily, but to be honest, if users don't know the
difference between <> and "" in #include statements, they're going to
have a lot of problems anyway ;-)

We could mention it in faq._tx, though.

>There are also lots of dos-isms
>in the examples.

How do you mean? (No, I haven't really looked through the examples
much). If there is anything particularly bad, we should change it.

>4: Be very specific in how to install devcpp, mingw, djgpp, and mention bugs
>like the winvm thing and updates (new binutils for SSE etc).

Yes, sounds fair. Let's see what everyone says regarding point #1 and go
from there. I'm quite happy to update readme.dj (or whatever it
becomes).

Thanks for your input, Robin.

Bye for now,
-- 
Laurence Withers, lwithers@xxxxxxxxxx
                http://www.lwithers.demon.co.uk/

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