Mattias Gärtner ha scritto:
Zitat von Giuliano Colla <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
[...] Michael Van Canneyt ha scritto:
On Mon, 21 Jan 2008, Giuliano Colla wrote:
Florian Klaempfl ha scritto:
Lord Satan schrieb:
[...]
That's correct. And if they had used OpenGL for it, it would be
hardware accelerated, cross plattform and good looking, too. And we
would need no stupid Aero or Compiz or other composition managers.
And we could do things other widgetsets could only dream of. And
porting to OpenES would be easy, too. Stupid Lazarus developers.
That's simply not the aim of the lazarus developers. They are interested
in native gui support and high vcl compatibility, no more, no less.
That's the real catch. They're not stupid, but they're faced with an
impossible task: to implement conflicting specs.
vcl implies a number of precise, consistent specs, which dictate component
behavior. They're the real value of Delphi.
Native widgetsets implies a number of specs (often vague and loosely
defined)
which are different from vcl, and don't map into them.
The VCL doesn't dictate anything, it's a wrapper around Win32 native
controls, so at least that widgetset should "work".
It provides properties and methods which are in most cases
self-explanatory. The Color Property of a Form or of a Button dictates
its color. Well, try just to set this property to clRed, or clButtonFace
with different widgesets, and compare the behavior.
This is a question of priority.
Some widgetset developers and some lazarus developers think that changing the
'color' is seldom a good solution and so they don't invest time on this. So it
is up to those who think, that this property is useful to implement and
maintain it. If the implementation breaks other features then the developers
have to decide what is more important.
I doubt Borland went as far as to specify a set of consistent specs.
At least I never saw them. And the behaviour changed (subtly) over the
versions of Delphi/Windows as well.
You can discuss forever about this. The only thing that the Lazarus people
can try to do is make the widgetset behave as consistent as possible over
all widgetsets, without sacrificing the native look they get by using
native
widgets.
Or they could achieve native look just by using a Bitmap, and consistent
behavior with code in LCL, with less duplicated work, less bugs, and
better results.
Instead of putting a lot of time in such mostly useless debates (its not
the first, and probably not the last) it would have been better to report
possible bugs or - better yet - provide patches to improve the behaviour.
When you're told that the feature can't be implemented because the
widgetset doesn't support it, you stop reporting.
When you see that the development line is to move the implementation
from LCL to widgetset, instead of the opposite, (and breaking what was
already working in the process), you stop providing patches, and start
whining. :-(
Breaking is bad, but sometimes inevitable.
For example Drag and Drop was improved in the LCL/gtk, but without a proper
threshold, so treeviews become unusable on some machines. I will not complain,
because the general direction is right and if no one fixes it I will fix it
myself. Even though I already fixed it in the past.
About: move from LCL to widgetset
That was the goal of lazarus from the beginning.
If you want a visual component library with a minimal backend, then use fpGUI or
msegui.
Keep in mind that using the native widgets has several advantages:
- native look. Even when user switches theme or OS.
- widgetset specific goodies: e.g. tab menu of gtk notebook, unicode input
method, assistive technology, hardware acceleration, network support (X
client/server modell).
So basically every drawing should be avoided in the LCL or at least use only
high level drawing functions.
Well, I can't claim that I only hold the truth, and everybody else is wrong.
But I can claim to represent a part of the outside world, those who are
USING Delphi,Lazarus, etc. to develop applications, and who make a
living out of it.
I've been earning my bread and butter developing computer applications
for 40 years now (my God, how old I've become! :-) ) I presume i didn't
do it so badly, because I never missed a meal, and the only customers
I've ever lost are those who died of old age (sadly too many, now that I
think of it). I could happily retire now, weren't that I still have fun
doing what I'm doing.
Well in all that time I've never met a single customer requiring a
"native look". On the contrary what I've always been asked for is a
"specific" look, and "specific" behavior.
Recently I've visited a customer which has still an old text-style
implementation (sort of custom ncurses) and when I proposed a GUI
interface, he reacted: "Provided it's not Windows-like. We have already
had this bad experience. We want something user oriented, not Windows
oriented!". Then I showed him some samples and he softened.
Well, Lazarus is intended to develop commercial applications, not GPL
utilities to be added to Gnome desktop. Commercial applications take
care to provide their own specific look.
If we look at some widely known multiplatform applications, we find that
Red Hat created it's specific Bluecurve style, in order to avoid the
native look of gtk, and provide uniform RedHat style to Gnome and Kde
desktops. OpenOffice, Mozilla, Gimp, Acrobat Reader (to some extent), Qt
Designer, not to speak of players like Winamp or XMMS provide the same
look in all platforms, with OpenOffice and Acrobat going to the point of
using only their own fonts.
Moreover multiplatform doesn't mean adding up all limitations of the
supported platforms, but rather providing a consistent look and behavior
in different platforms, with minimal programmer extra work.
Of course, I can take a different path for myself (fpGUI, msegui,
MyOwnGui), but I feel belonging to Lazarus community, I see a lot of
work being done, a lot of impressing achievements whenever the sacred
cows of Delphi compatibility and widgetset compliance are forgotten,
such as in component anchoring or in IDE conception. Therefore, backed
by my personal experience, I feel it right to raise doubts on the
priorities you clearly indicated, and humbly suggest that it could be
the time to reconsider them with open mind.
Giuliano
--
Giuliano Colla
Whenever people agree with me, I always feel I must be wrong (O. Wilde)
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