On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 10:27:20AM +0200, Michal Nowak wrote:
On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 9:02 PM, Jorge Arellano Cid<jcid@dillo.org> wrote:
[...] ?In a nutshell (from my point of view):
? * fltk2 is not officially released, and maybe never will. ? * dillo2 uses fltk2, and this creates pressure to package it. ? * Distros have a policy against statically-linked binaries.
Definitely agree. The first and the second one can be somehow sorted out and fltk2 pushed to distribution, the last one is blocker.
[...] You greatly outlined the problems with having Dillo-2 in distribution; the problem is FLTK2. While watching at "changes" in FLTK2 snapshots I can't thing that the development is stalled or even stopped.
You surely refer to the 1.3 series because FLTK2 is quite stalled. e.g. (nov 2008 version against current) diff -pru fltk-2.0.x-r6525 fltk-2.0.x-r6786|less /* Only whitespace and an email address change here! */ FLTK-1.3 is the active one (a fact recognized by Bill Spitzak).
I understand that my proposal won't be popular but switching from FLTK2 is necessary - we hardly have FLTK2 in distributions (read: no Dillo-2 in distribution) and that's shortening our user base.
I agree on the shortened user base, but the proposal to switch to FLTK-1.3 is the probable course of action.
How hard it would be to rewrite/port Dillo-2 to FLTK-1.3?
(I see that the speed of v1.3 development is nothing exciting, but from what I read months ago they at least plan to have a release ever.)
This branch has advanced a lot. It has less open bugs than FLTK-2.0 [1], an active set of developers, and they've devoted plenty of time to good documentation.
While looking at the devel cycle of Dillo - two releases per year - I believe this porting should be mid-term goal. Unless we wanna spend another year out of mainstream distributions. (And frankly: even with Dillo-2 based on FLTK-1.3 we are quite far from Dillo-2 in distribution...)
Some months ago I had long emails with FLTK developers regarding this point. FLTK-1.3 may have a release in the middle of 2009 and they may even consider a compatibility layer for FLTK-2.0 apps (for them, it would be a most appealing assset to have FLTK-2.0 apps. compile with FLTK-1.3 painlessly). Now, given the effort estimation by corvid, I'd go with a native port as soon as FLTK-1.3 is released (unless the compatibility layer is there, or porting turns out to be a major endeavour). If they succeed in an official release, chances are we'll have FLTK-1.3 in distros when we finish our port. BTW, their advice is to wait for the first release and then decide what to do. [1] http://fltk.org/roadmap.php -- Cheers Jorge.-