Re: [Gnash-dev] architecture question

[Rob Savoye]

Charles Crisler wrote:
> I am curious about the architecture plan for gnash relative to GUIs and
> rendering. Currently you support several GUIs and 3 rendering backends.
> I also haven't found that you can download Linux binaries. Maybe there
> is a correlation? :-)

  Nope, none at all. We do have some linux binaries, including some in
rpm, deb, and xpi packages for a variety of machines. These are at
http://www.getgnash.org, maybe you missed it. :-) Most people prefer to
get their binary packages from their distribution, like Ubuntu or Fedora.

  Most of our GUIs are a thin layer on top of a generic gui library for
the real guts. I personally like portable code, so I don't see any
reason to not have different GUIs for different reasons. Konqueror users
need a flash plugin as much as Firefox users, so we have GTK and KDE
support both. On embedded platforms there are less resources, so GUIs
like SDL, FLTK, or a raw framebuffer work much better.

  Much of the reasons for this are historical. Originally Gnash was
OpenGL and SDL only. SDL is limited for a decent GUI, so I wrote GTK
support, while keeping the SDL support alive. Then somebody donated KDE
support, Udo added the raw framebuffer support, etc...

  OpenGL was nice, but many devices don't have a GPU, so Udo added the
the AGG backend. If you do have a GPU, OpenGL is nice, so that was keep
alive as well. Cairo was also donated. While having all these options
may seem like a distraction, being able to run on most anything is
important for free software.

        - rob -