Status report

It seems like many of the back-ends are starting to work nicely. There
are still wrinkles to be ironed out (including some optimisations to
avoid the worst bottlenecks) of course. I'll start full testing of all
the back-ends in a while (with the nondist/admin/status.txt-thing,
remember?).

I'm happy to see people responding to my headcount. What I've gotten
so far (from what you have said, and from what I believe you're
working on) is:

  - Phil: Available. Works mainly on qtgui, and possibly some
    front-end profiling with Dallas and Samuele

  - Joe: Available (~8h/w). Works on front-end and tkgui, mswgui,
    wxgui (and, I guess, the text UIs?)

  - Kalle: Semi-available (a few h/w). Works on gtkgui.

  - Matt: Having OS trouble. Can possibly do some tkgui work on Mac OS
    8. (Note: You aren not, of course, restricted to working on
    beosgui; any work is good :)

  - Robin: Works on the calldll-version of mswgui.

  - Samuele: Available for bug fixing primarily (including incremental
    code improvements and refactoring). Mostly works with javagui, but
    also front-end and other back-ends if needed.

  - Dallas: Available. Works on models and gtkgui. Can help with
    qtgui. Front-end profiling (Phil and Samuele also seem to be doing
    a bit of that).

  - Magnus: Available (but will be away on a LARP from friday till
    sunday). Works on front-end, javagui, and documentation (and
    anything else that must be done).

What must be done for the first alpha (which is our current goal)?
Mainly all plainly visible bugs must be ironed out, all back-ends
(with some possible exceptions, e.g. beosgui) should implement the 0.1
functionality, using the new architecture. There are three additional
requirements:

  1. All components that use text should now support fonts, alignment,
     and colour. (Back-ends that cannot handle colour may safely
     ignore colour information.)

  2. Support must be added for menus, including popup menus. (This, of
     course, requires that we can soon conclude the seemingly endless
     and slowly moving design process for the menu API ;)

  3. Support for dialogs must be added, including support for native
     dialogs such as file dialogs, warning dialogs, etc. (I assume we
     can add a Dialog class that functions like a Window, and then add
     specific classes such as FileDialog for the relevant native ones.
     We don't have to go overboard with nativ dialogs yet; file
     dialogs are the main focus.)

It seems that we have the manpower to get a lot of this stuff done
(including the recently discussed improvements to the push/pull
mechanism etc.) If anyone would like more detailed suggestions on what
to do, just say so. And remember to tell the others what you're
working on so we can avoid duplication of effort.

As mentioned, I'll be going away for a LARP [1] on friday (I'm one of
the people behind it so I'll be quite busy tomorrow too ;) but I'll be
back on sunday. (No -- no computer until then.)

[1] http://neoduct.com/bl4 (all in Norwegian :)

-- 
Magnus Lie Hetland                                  The Anygui Project
http://hetland.org                                  http://anygui.org


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