[Wxruby-dev] Status report, and a plan (and an alternate plan)

[Kevin Smith]

Unfortunately, I have been tied up in crunch mode at work for the last
three weeks. Not much time or energy left to work on wxRuby, although
I've done a few small tasks.

A couple things have become clear to me:

1. Converting to my template approach will take a long time to complete.
If I could convert one class each day, it would still take more than two
months.

2. Nobody should use the library until after we convert the method names
to match ruby conventions. Therefore, this should be the highest
priority story. It would be easier to do this after converting to
templates, but that's too far in the future.

Therefore, I plan to start renaming methods this weekend. I hope to
complete the entire library quickly (perhaps this weekend). At that
point, the library will be ready for alpha testing. Hopefully that will
bring in feedback which can drive further development.

If there are serious bugs (leaks, crashing), we can fix them. If there
are missing methods in certain classes, I can focus on switching those
classes to the template method first, at which point it becomes very
easy to add the missing methods.

As time permits, I can continue a slow but steady conversion of other
classes to templates.

So that's my plan. But there is one alternative that I will put out
there as an option:

I could comment out all the non-template classes, and convert just the
template classes to the new naming scheme. Next, I could convert all the
classes used by the examples. At that point, the library would be very
small, but there would be no legacy code to worry about. As alpha
testers needed additional classes to be supported, I would create the
templates for those classes.

This alternate plan would be cleaner, and a bit easier for me, but I
think it would cause too many problems for potential users of the
library. I've only mentioned it as a possibility in case anyone thinks
it's a great idea.

Kevin