Re: [AD] thoughts on a release

[Evert Glebbeek <eglebbk@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 19 Jan 2010, at 22:05 , Peter Wang wrote:
> So, activity on 4.9 been a bit low for a few months.  Probably everyone
> has more interesting things to do.  Perhaps the library is in pretty
> good shape.

That's probably the other reason for it: there are no or very few "big issues" left.

>  I have been wondering if we should seriously consider
> making a 5.0 release soon, i.e. in a few months.

April first?
;)

> *If* we were to do that, what changes would be critical to you?
> What features would you be happy to put off?  Note that Allegro 5.2
> doesn't have to be a long time in coming, but nor is it guaranteed that
> 5.2 would ever come out.

I agree with Elias about END_OF_MAIN(). I've been meaning to get back to it for months now and I might as well have a stab at it this weekend, seeing how I'm unlikely to have more time in the immediate future (and am quite likely to get even less time). I had a working solution for OS X a few months ago but sortof left it there. I think that's the only hurdle though: generic *nix doesn't need it, MinGW doesn't need it and MSVC can get by with a preprocessor directive (it's in the archive somewhere, I'll find it).

Changing the OS X Carbon code to Cocoa (future proofing/64 bit ready) and getting rid of all the warnings that have popped up during compilation on OS X 10.6 is a priority, but it shouldn't affect either the API or the ABI, I think. So if needed, that can wait for 5.0.1 (say).
In a general sense, the OS X port can be a bit more streamlined and it can do a bit more logging, but that's again something that shouldn't affect API or ABI compatibility.

Finally, something I don't personally care about but some other people might (will): a library framework for Allegro. There'll probably be a demand for this, but this may just be something that fits in the "binary release" category. Either way, it may be a good idea to default to static linking on OS X.

I think that's it from me.
Oh, I'd still like to see a MIDI player addon, but I'm quite happy to wait for someone outside of the main developers to provide one (which may never happen).
There is the issue of a compatibility layer. What I have is pretty old, incomplete and bitrotted. I might be able to get back to it, but as I said in a thread on Acc, I now think it may actually be better in a way to "port" A4 to A5.

Evert