Am Samstag, 21. Februar 2009 16:18 schrieb Eric Kow:
Hi Wolgang,
Hmm, wrong again. ;-)
On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 12:53:23 +0100, Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:
What do you mean with “something which will make it much easier for third parties to write a GUI in the future”?
Kari's example of GUI-friendly optimisations might be one thought.
More generally, I was thinking of some kind of darcs library design work: now that we have exposed all our modules in a sort of darcs library, how we can grow this into a proper library that people can "safely" use (safe in the sense that the library makes it very clear what kinds of operations are read-only, or to what extent operations are "atomic", preferably with atomic repository-manipulating functions only being exposed and not their underlying substeps). The library could also tackle issues like darcs sending messages back to the user (right now, we just putStrLn, but what if we want them to go a special Window?)
Tomorrow, I will discuss with the first half of my student project students (3 students) about what exact topic they will pursue. My idea is to let them start a Grapefruit-based darcs GUI. They should not use the currenct darcs interface directly where it doesn’t fit GUI frontends well. Instead they should write a wrapper around the “ugly” parts which exposes a “nice” interface. Later, one could merge this wrapper into the darcs codebase so that darcs exports the “nice” interface then. The GUI code wouldn’t have to change much then. In April, the second half of the students will start with their project. If there is some graphics support in Grapefruit at that time then they might work on a patch viewer. What do you think about that? Best wishes, Wolfgang