On 12 Feb 2010, at 19:23, Emil wrote:

>> Emil wrote:
>>> Hello!
>>> Is FLTK2 supported? If not, then why?
>>
>> The official stance on the various FLTK releases is:
>> http://fltk.org/articles.php?L825+I0+T+P1+Q
>>
>> There was a big thread on the nitty gritty details last summer,
>> so to prevent a lot of typing from the devs, I'm going to link you  
>> to that,
>> as everyone seemed to chime in (note the subject):
>> http://fltk.org/newsgroups.php?gfltk.development+T+Q%22ARE+THERE 
>> +STILL+ACTIVE%22
>>
>> In short, the folks that started FLTK 2.x development seemed to  
>> have just..
>> stopped developing.
>
> It may seem stupid but I don't get it, why to give up on such a  
> great API as in FLTK2? What is so great about FLTK 1.3? New widgets?

No - almost the reverse; old widgets...

There are two key things about the fltk-1.x series over the fltk-2  
series:

- Stability: It works, and is largely bug-free. Unfortunately the  
fltk-2 tree never really achieved stability and is littered with bugs  
(fixes for many of which do exist either in STR's or in fixes to the  
1.x series that were never back-ported. But no one ever did the work.)

- Installed code base: There's a lot more code written for the fltk-1  
API, and more people actively using it. So support of fltk-1.1  
continued, whilst support for fltk-2 simply faded away, and none of  
the users seem to have been invested in it enough to pick up the ball.
Note that the majority of the fltk-1 devs now are not the original  
devs, but are people who had large code investments that depend on  
fltk. So they joined the project to keep it alive because it directly  
affected their work. That never seemed to happen with fltk-2; when  
the original devs had to focus elsewhere, fltk-2 withered and seems  
to have died.

So, fltk-1.3 is the next step in the fltk-1.x series, and all my  
current code (much of which is many, many years old) builds correctly  
with either fltk-1.1 or fltk-1.3.

Back in the day, I did port a lot of my code to fltk-2, but the lack  
of stability destroyed my confidence in it's usefulness. None of that  
code will now build against the current fltk-2 svn, due to the  
extensive changes that were made to the fltk-2 API.



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