[Gnash-dev] GUIs

[Benjamin Wolsey]

Hi list,

I'd like to remove code for various GUIs and options that aren't used,
don't work, or both.

Removing the code would make improvements to Gnash's main GUIs easier.

The current design isn't user-friendly: you can't open the GUI without
playing a SWF file, and you can only play one file per session. It might
be preferable to abandon this single GUI design completely and make
individual GUIs for each supported toolkit. But whichever way we go in
future, the current situation only slows down development of new
features (and renderers).

Now that the Gnash core libraries are re-entrant, developers can use
them in applications however they like. Gnash doesn't officially have a
stable API, but the interface from a UI to the core is relatively small
and stable.

For this reason I think it's best to be aggressive in removing GUIs from
Gnash's codebase, preferring to allow them to be developed separately.
Obviously, any code removed can still be retrieved using git.

The things I'd like to remove, along with the reasons, are:

hwaccel:
xv - doesn't work.

GUI support:
riscos - not used
aqua - doesn't work.
hildon - not used.
alp - not used.
fltk - uses FLTK2, which is no longer developed.

haiku and aos4 have their own maintainers inside Gnash, though there may
also be advantages in developing the GUI separately.

Note that the reasons given may not be accurate! I'm writing to the list
to see if any of the listed code is still needed.

bwy

-- 
--
Free Flash, use Gnash
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

Benjamin Wolsey, Software Developer - http://benjaminwolsey.de
C++ and Open-Source Flash blog - http://www.benjaminwolsey.de/bwysblog

xmpp:address@hidden
http://identi.ca/bwy

signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part