RE: [XBoard-devel] Re: XBoard stuff

[Dan Jenkins]

That all sounds good.  I'll probably start trying to do some of this stuff 
within the next few days.

I realized right after I sent that last e-mail that I had sent it to the 
Contact group I had setup in Hotmail instead of the list...  I was going to 
resend it to the list when I realized that Hotmail doesn't save your sent 
mail by default! :)

Anyway, I'm getting the xboard-devel mail just fine and removed my "XBoard 
Team" contact group from hotmail so that I remember to send it to the list 
in the future.

----Original Message Follows----
From: Tim Mann <address@hidden>
To: "Dan Jenkins" <address@hidden>
CC: address@hidden, address@hidden
Subject: [XBoard-devel] Re: XBoard stuff
Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2003 10:26:00 -0800

That sounds like good progress.  Let's use the xboard-devel mailing list
for discussion -- assuming it works, that is.  Just to confirm that,
could each of you reply to me (not the list) if you get this message?

A few comments interspersed.

On Mon, 01 Dec 2003 10:48:51 -0600, "Dan Jenkins" <address@hidden> 
wrote:
> Hi guys.
>
> I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving weekend!
>
> Just thought I'd  check up on how everyone was doing and toss around a 
few
> ideas I had for how I'd like to try and start implementing an OpenGL 
front
> end for XBoard.  I feel group communication on projects like this is
> important to keep from stepping on each others toes too much. :)
>
> First of all, I spent some time this weekend trying to get a better grasp 
of
> the GNU autotools.  I'm still far from confident in my knowledge of them,
> but I am reasonably sure I can add some stuff to conditionally link in 
the
> GL libraries, and add the appropriate #defines to the config.h.  I found
> some M4 macros to check for GL and GLU at the GNU Autoconf Macro archive.
> (http://www.gnu.org/software/ac-archive/htmldoc/)  These seemed to work
> pretty well on my Slackware system and are probably much more complete 
than
> what I could write on my own.

Sounds good.

> Next, I thought about trying to move some of the Xaw code for drawing the
> board into a separate file so that the xboard.c file is composed mainly 
of
> stuff like Window creation and handling of window events, and so that it
> might be easier to try and start defining a common GUI interface between
> OpenGL and any other UIs.

That's good.  If you want, you could also pull out Unix-specific code
that isn't X related at all into a third file (assuming you find some
that can be pulled out fairly cleanly).  We'd been talking about that as
a step toward replacing Xaw with GTK+.

> Once I get to the stage of actually trying to plug my OpenGL code into
> Xboard, I thought that initially, I could implement a command-line option 
to
> enable GL mode.  I figured if I did that, it would be easier to keep from
> messing up the original code too bad so that everyone else could still 
see
> the board as it is now.

Doing it as a command-line option as the first step seems fine.

One thing to watch out for: the existing code has a weakness that some
things can be done only from the command line because they're tangled up
with program initialization -- in particular, resizing the window.  It
would be nice not to make initialization any harder to untangle, as
we'll want to make the window resizable at some point.

> If you have any thoughts/comments about any of the above, or if any of my
> ideas will totally mess up stuff you are working on, let me know.  Also, 
if
> you have any ideas of how we should design the front end code in a way 
that
> we can support multiple UIs, I'd love to discuss them.

I think the interface between the chessboard proper (not including the
clocks, menu bar, text line, etc.) and the rest of the program is
already pretty narrow.  I think the idea you were talking about before,
of making that part into an object-like interface (struct containing
several function pointers) is a good direction to go.

>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Groove on the latest from the hot new rock groups!  Get downloads, 
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>


--
Tim Mann  address@hidden  http://tim-mann.org/


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