Re: [AD] The Grabber and GUI in 4.3 (was: Re: 4.3.0 progress)

[Chris <chris.kcat@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sunday 23 July 2006 09:10, Andrei Ellman wrote:
> Here's a thought. Perhaps the grabber could be written in such a way
> that it is easy to change which GUI-library is being used.

That would be a heck of a lot of work, especially considering different GUI 
libs behave differently and use different interfaces and semantics. It won't 
be so easy to abstract away. I think it would be best to just pick one 
cross-platform GUI lib and stick with it.

> I presume that in order to maintain backward compatibility with 4.2, 4.4
> is going to have some sort of addon that emulates Allegro's GUI. It
> would be up to whoever maintains this addon to maintain the Allegro-GUI
> version of the grabber.

AFAIK, the grabber is going to switch to use the new API. If it does, I don't 
believe you should/could mix using the old and new API like that.

> Also, AFAIK, Qt4 is C++ only (although I may be 
> wrong). It would be nice to still be able to build Allegro and all it's
> utilities using plain C. Also, I'm not sure if Qt4 is available for all
> the platforms supported by Allegro.

The way I see it, there's nothing wrong with using C++ for helper 
applications, since they're not part of the main lib. They're external 
applications just like any other, except they ship and build with Allegro by 
default. I can sorta understand an aversion to using C++ for the main lib, 
but I don't see why the helper tools can't use it.

As for supported platforms, I'm pretty sure Qt4 can handle even more platforms 
than Allegro is going to target. Since DOS and MacOS 9 are being removed, the 
only platform I can think of would be the Linux console.. and who uses that 
exclusively? A command line tool for whatever the new grabber would handle 
should still exist, so if worse comes to worse, you can use that.

> It would be up to the maintainers of additional GUI-library-addons (such
> as MASkinG, AEGUI, etc.) to maintain their version of the
> grabber-frontend and update their GUI for each new grabber-feature that
> is added.

Why duplicate all the work? Just pick one useable GUI library and use that. 
Qt4 is free for what we'd use it for, available on just about anything 
Allegro will be, and, it's a very good GUI lib. I don't think the fact that 
it's C++ should be a concern. This is 2006 after all, not 1996. :P