[xiphos-devel] an idea for the future of xiphos

[Peter von Kaehne]

I am not a real programmer, but have been closely involved with Xiphos
and particularly with the effort to get it translated and to make its
GUI work in RtoL languages. In recent years I have much withdrawn from
its maintenance and development ( I do use it daily) as I do not
understand much of the innards (I have tried...) But I would be more
than willing to contribute as much as possible and in particular test,
test and test again in those places where others (with e.g. no RtoL
knowledge) 

Peter




On Mon, 2017-04-24 at 13:43 +1000, Christopher Bayliss wrote:
> The recent release made me think about this. :)
> 
> I imagine the GTK3 support must be pretty bad now as there have been
> a
> lot of API changes, but I haven't used xiphos in awhile, life has
> been
> **very busy**. So I was thinking about a way to make it easier to use
> newer GUI toolkits:
> 
> We could separate out all the cool features of xiphos that are not
> GUI
> related and put them into a library called libxiphos.
> 
> Then write a new frontend in, for example, python and GTK3. Or not.
> If
> we have libxiphos, it would be easier to use an entirely different
> toolkit, like Qt5.
> 
> I guess my point is it will get harder to maintain the GTK3 part of
> Xiphos as they change the way it works more with each release,
> meaning
> we are going to have to rewrite the way we use the GTK3 API anyway.
> However it looks like the GTK team is working on a plan to make this
> easier:
> 
> https://blog.gtk.org/2016/09/01/versioning-and-long-term-stability-pr
> omise-in-gtk/
> 
> IDK if my idea is a good solution, but I believe we are going to have
> to
> figure something out, so I proposing it anyway. :) One of the
> advantages
> of using a scripting language like python to write the frontend in
> is,
> it would be fast to write. (I hate python, but I see it's uses) And
> if
> we have libxiphos, which would be largely c and c++, we wouldn't have
> any of the performance issues that python commonly brings with it.
> 
> Lastly I'd be down for a team effort to do a whole bunch of work on
> xiphos in about a month, if we can find a similar times that we can
> work
> together on it.
> 
> -- cjbayliss
> 
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