Re: Status?

[Bruce Wampler <bruce@objectcentral.com>]

V 1.21 is really almost ready. I hope to release the mainline version next week.

There are not a lot of major changes. The User Manual is the main change, I think.
I've abandonded support of the LaTeX version, and have switched entirely to HTML.
There were several reasons for this. In retrospect, the main reason is that the new
HTML version is really neat. I researched as many online manuals as I could find.
Many, many are conversions of LaTeX or Info files, and frankly, the translations are
really not that great. While you do get all the content, they just don't take advantage
of some neat things you can do in HTML. If found a few online manuals that I liked,
and tried to adopt some of the nicer features.

Other than that, I was really having problems converting my LaTeX to HTML in any
constant, reliable fashion. I was reduced to using a custom modified version of a
converter, and the results weren't that great. I won't be able to put my resources into
both versions, and the LaTeX version is now out of date. If anyone really wants the
LaTeX version, I'd be happy to extract the core reference manual (leaving the tutorial
stuff as HTML only), and let someone else bring it up to date and maintain it.

And I'm also sure that someone adept at scripts and sed or the like could write a
script that would take all the main HTML pages and combine them nicely into
a single document. (Or tell me how to make HTML use the equivalent of #include -
I don't think it can do that) which can be printed nicely.

The OS/2 port will soon be 1.21 ready, as will the gtk port. They will be released
within a month or so, I'd guess.

Here's some answers to the specific questions:

PETER HOPFGARTNER wrote:

>      I hope not to make any pressure on anybody, but could it be possible
>      to have an outlook o the next V release? (I'm quite new to it, but I
>      was impressed by the simplicity of the GUI programming).
>
>      In particular:
>
>      Will gtk support be included? If yes, will there also be support for
>      OpenGL/gtk?

Yes - very very soon now. I'm pretty sure the OpenGL will still work.

>
>
>      Will thus the Athena support be dropped?

No.

>
>
>      Will the configuration be based on autoconf?

The gtk will be autoconf, and perhaps I will eventually use that start to
autoconf the Athena version.

>
>
>      Will it compile out of the box on Cygnus b20?

I think it does. That is still on my to do list. I plan to release binary mingw32/egcs
and Cygnus b20 V libraries either with the 1.21 release, or shortly after. I will also
try to release a reasonable default Linux binary.

>
>
>      What else will be coming up?

V 1.21 is const correct capable - the symbol VCONST is used throughout the source,
and can generate const correct V code with proper definitions. The default will not
be for const, however, as the code needs more testing. I hope enough people will
use VCONST to discover incompatibilites. In particular, there may be some issues
with the mutable attribute for some compilers.

--

Bruce E. Wampler, Ph.D.

Author of the V C++ GUI Framework

e-mail: mailto:bruce@objectcentral.com
web:    http://www.objectcentral.com