Re: [AD] [Win] Proposal

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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




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