On Tue, 28 Nov 2000, Kevin Lawton wrote:
> Well, first I think people got me wrong. My point is that our virtual
> graphics card should spit out a _generic_ set of primitives, for which
> there are GUI _specific_ methods. One set of specific methods for
> SDL, one for X, one for Win32, etc.
But SDL itself is a wrapper for X, or Win32 (depending in the platform
:)). That's the whole goal of SDL: to write ONE interface to multiple
platforms. Replicating the SDL idea doesn't seem to have much point...
> Architecting our video handling to expect, assume, and rely on SDL
> is a broken idea. SDL looks quite cool, and I think using it might
> make a good primary use target. Not all users will have it installed,
> so we need to have X specific methods too.
Well, people may not have X installed either. And binaries could be
statically linked... I don't quite see the point; requiring specific
libraries for a software package is a normal practice in software
engineering, what's wrong with that?
> Anyways, why don't I rephrase this and say, let's write X and SDL
> methods in parallel. But we at least ought to have X. I'm not
> keen on having plex86 _dependent_ on X, but I think it's an excellent
> idea to have SDL so we can make the video processing kick-ass.
But SDL *IS* X on systems which don't support a more advanced form of
graphics... that's the whole idea behind the use of SDL!
We want to use SDL in order to save us a lot of porting work. If you're
going to be doing porting anyway, might as well forget about
SDL... there's no point...
-- Ramon
