Re: [XBoard-devel] gtk and x11 in parallel

[Arun Persaud]

Hi

On 06/05/2011 07:53 AM, address@hidden wrote:
>> This would mean you have to convert the main window
>> including menubar, board and pieces etc from Xt to GTK in one go which
>> sounds like a lot of work.
> 
>> When I looked at the Xboard GTK-20100806 version I thought it didn't look
>> bad. Are there some problems with this version?
> 
> I thought the current version in the GTK branch had more or less done all
> that,[...]

There are several problems with the GTK-20100806 version: it's very
close in respect that you could play a whole game, but many features are
missing, for example fonts and themes, support for variations, many
things are also just not working correctly (e.g. window resizing).
Another big problem is that it hasn't been merged with master in a long
time and therefore is missing lots of features and since many of the new
features involve updates to X-code merging it would probably be a
nightmare...

As far as I understand mixing GTK and Xt in one window is not possible
and, as you mentioned, we would need to port window by window...
Porting the main window will be the hardest, but since we can probably
copy several things from the old GTK-branch it might not be too bad...

The biggest advantage would be that we should have a working XBoard
during the whole time and can do releases with new features and bugfixes
while working on the GTK transition. It's also easier to break this big
task into small portions, so that other people can perhaps contribute
some code...

I think the biggest problem we have is time... we just don't have enough
available time/people so that we can just do the whole GTK transition in
one go... if you look at the past commits, almost all the code is from
HGM. Recently Tim worked on the internationalization and I mostly do the
releases, etc.

I don't see many disadvantages for mixing Gtk and Xt, if we can get some
of the small problems figured out (e.g. CPU usage, etc.)

cheers
        ARUN