matthiasm wrote: > The bigger question for me right now is, where is FLTK heading? How > many users do we have currently, and how many do we want to attract? > [...] > Whatever we do, we must re-bundle our energy. Splitting developers > between 2.0 and 1.1 is a drag!
I'm a lapsed 1.1.x user, hoping to get back to my pet project when I eventually have time, but the code base is so small I have no real requirement to run with 1.1.x or 2.0, and no real axe to grind. However, from the discussions here over the years, I have the idea that many potential users are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. Go with 1.1 because it's stable, but lacks UTF-8, or go with 2.0, which is unstable but has UTF-8. Poll 19 (http://www.fltk.org/poll.php?r19) shows 48% of users are running with 1.1 or 1.2 but waiting for 2.0 to mature, and Poll 16 (http://www.fltk.org/poll.php?r16) shows 40% of those interested in 2.0 are excited about UTF-8 support. Maybe I'm adding 2 and 2 and getting 5, but if I read between the lines of the polls, along with repeated questions about how to display text in chinese or whatever, I get the idea that if UTF-8 were added to the stable 1.1 then more users would attracted to fltk, and would stay with fltk. Heck, if I understand correctly, even Greg as a super-poweruser backports code to one of the older [stalled?] branched versions so that he has UTF-8 support. Personally, I don't need UTF-8 in my pet project, but it seems to me that if it isn't available in a stable fltk offering, then the user community is unlikely to grow, and users will be attracted to other, heavy, toolkits that do. [Millan's threat to go to FOX?] The long term goal of unifying the 1.1 and 2.0 developments, or at least harmonising them, still needs to be addressed[*] but I think that adding UTF-8 to 1.1 is what will provide the biggest benefit to the user community in the short term. Cheers Duncan [*] What would this mean in practice? Refactoring 1.1 to use 2.0 data structures? Re-engineering 1.1 features and bug fixes to fit in 2.0? I haven't looked at 2.0, so I have no idea what people have in mind. _______________________________________________ fltk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.easysw.com/mailman/listinfo/fltk
