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On Sunday 21 January 2007 3:22 pm, Evert Glebbeek wrote:
> On Saturday 20 January 2007 18:31, Thomas Fjellstrom wrote:
> > I honestly think we need to start actively looking for windows
>
> programmers.
>
> > Just expecting them to find us, and assume we actually need and WANT them
>
> is
>
> > asking too much.
>
> Definately agree.
>
> > Some announcements on various sites by someone with decent writing skills
> > would be a good start.
>
> I've done the advertisement (on ACC) following a release once or twice, and
> usually enough people are willing or interested in helping. The problem
> is, they want something concrete to do then and there, which requires a
> lengthy explanation of Allegro's internals and what needs to be done,
> which someone has to write, which takes up a lot of time, which ends up
> not being done.
>
> Ideally, the wiki should contain enough information to get people started;
> I'll be the first to admit that I don't use the wiki that often (not sure
> if I even registered an account there), so I don't know how well it could
> serve that role right now.
> I propose the following: we document on the wiki what has been done for
> Allegro's internals (for the 4.3 branch) so that new people can join in
> there easily. At the same time, we set a number of goals we want to meet
> for 4.3.1, and set ourselves a deadline. We can start the work and sync
> the Windows port until someone steps forward and declares a willingness to
> start to actively develop the Windows port.
>
> So this actually leads me to the following questions:
> 1) How well are the (proposed, new) internals documented at the moment?
> 2) Who is doing what and what has been done? I think Elias forked off a
> branch to play with the display drivers a bit (the actual drivers, not
> starting with the API sitting on the old drivers as I did), what is the
> status of this? (I assume I don't need to repeat that I don't personally
> like a state-based API, but that's for another discussion). I think Chris
> did some more work on the audio part of it, what's the status of this?
> 3) What goals do we set for 4.3.1? I think a working grahhics system, even
> if it only works through X11 or OpenGL is ok to start with, more can be
> added in later, and I personally think we can make API changes along the
> 4.3 branch to the new API; it's in a state of flux anyway (but this is a
> debatable standpoint).
> 4) What target release date should we set for 4.3.1? I feel it should not
> be too distant, but not too soon either (we need time to get work done, or
> in my case get back into doing work on Allegro on a regular basis). What
> about April/May? That's about six months after 4.3.0, which seems
> reasonable.
>
> Once 2) and 3) are clear, I think we can do as you suggest and actively
> recruit people to work on the Windows side of things. Probably an extra
> MacOS X developer/tester will be good too, but I suspect MacOS X to be
> more likely to play nice with a basically UNIX+OpenGL based library than
> Windows does.
>
> Evert
To be honest, I was more talking about advertising for another admin, someone
who's willing to get down and dirty and learn where allegro, and where its
going. Someone who isn't afraid to help push allegro forward, and help design
with regards to windows.
The three main platforms are different enough that they will have to assert
some significant pressure on the overall design and layout of allegro, and
without a Windows Allegro Guru (not just a dev) (hmm, WAG the dog? :D), I
don't see that happening. Of course we'll want some plain old win devs as
well, but a WAG will imo, be absolutely necessary.
--
Thomas Fjellstrom
tfjellstrom@xxxxxxxxxx