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

[Andrei Ellman <ae-a-alleg@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Peter Wang wrote:
> On 2006-07-22, Chris <chris.kcat@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > Given that the GUI is probably going to be removed from the new API, I don't 
> > think grabber can stay around as it is. A (possibly radical) idea might be to 
> > just remove the current grabber (4.2's could be used in the mean time), and 
> > make a completely new grabber using Qt4. It's cross-platform almost 
> > everywhere, free for non-commercial use, will look like a native Windows app 
> > in Windows, will look good in X, etc. Checks could be done to see if it's 
> > installed on the user's system and build the grabber if so.

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 way, if 
someone wants to install an alternative GUI-library, then if that 
GUI-library comes with an implemntation of the grabber's GUI, then the 
grabber frontend of that GUI-library would be built. The backend of the 
grabber would be the same for each implementation (already during the 
build-process a library is built that is used by both the back-ends of 
the Dat utility and the Grabber utility. A shared library for all 
implementations of the grabber could be a bit more high-level).

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. 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.

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.


> I would like to move the datafile related code into an addon, so the
> grabber should go with it.  Anyone can write whatever frontend they
> like: datedit.c just needs to be made into a proper library.

I think that if the datafile code is going to be a separate addon, then 
it should only include the code for building dat.exe. The code for 
grabber.exe should come with whichever Allegro GUI-library-addon is 
being used (although for GUI-libraries such as Qt4 that aren't meant to 
be Allegro-addons, the grabber-frontend for such libraries could be 
distributed as a standalone package).


AE.