Getting wxHaskell into HP would be great and I'd be happy to commit a couple of hours each week for a year to help make it happen. That said, I'm relatively new to Haskell and have very little experience with linking with native libraries (my day job is Java programming) so I might need quite a lot of guidance, at least initially.
Regards, Maciek On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 11:36 PM, Jeremy O'Donoghue <jeremy.odonog...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi all, > > This is a call for help. There's been some discussion both on this list and > on the cafe about getting a GUI into Haskell Platform. > > The formal requirement is that inclusion needs to be supported by at least > one library maintainer, and from a practical perspective it should be > something which builds and works well on all supported platforms, i.e. > Linux, Windows and Mac, and should have a team of maintainers who are able > to maintain the code over a long term basis. > > While there have been some fantastic contributions to wxHaskell over the > past years from any people, the reality is that most of the work gets done > by me, and some may have noticed that I don't have a lot of time - certainly > nothing like enough to commit to inclusion in Haskell Platform. > > The call for help is this: can we get together a team which would be able to > field enough effort to make a submission for Haskell Platform realistic? I > believe that such a team would look something like the following: > > Project lead, release co-ordinator and mentor to others. That will be me > then. > Target leads for Linux, Mac and Windows. Responsible for building tip code > for their platforms and providing fixes when it breaks. In the case of Mac > and Linux, extra points if you can make things work using the platform > built-in wxWidgets. > A number of specific functional areas to be addressed: > > Fix the long-standing bug preventing GHCi use of wxHaskell. In my opinion, > this is best addressed by factoring the C wrapper for wxHaskell (we call it > wxC) into a separate library which is built as a dynamically loadable > library. I know, in principle, how to do this for Windows and Linux, but > would need help for Mac. Anyone who wants to help should know that this > involves lots of revolting work with linkers, and is especially suitable for > masochists. That's probably me as well. > Make it easier to wrap some of the optional wxWidgets libraries. This > requires work on wxDirect. This is probably the easiest area to work on as > wxDirect is a self-contained executable, and is small and fairly simple to > understand. > Using the above, wrap some of the optional libraries. STC should be > reinstated in wxHaskell now (it's part of the core in wxWidgets 2.9), but > there are many others. OpenGL canvas, AUI and the media framework look > particularly interesting. > Consider a pure Haskell replacement for wx-config, at least on Windows, but > potentially on all targets. We currently bundle a 3rd party wx-config > replacement for Windows, but it doesn't work very well on wxWidgets 2.9. > Extend Graphics.UI.WX so that more of the core functionality has high-level > wrappers, e.g. for Grid, List boxes etc. I would love to see an FRP wrapper > around parts of wxHaskell, and think we could reinstate one or more of the > FRP libraries, for example. Making GUI programming less like C programming > would do a lot to promote Haskell GUI development, but it requires much > better Haskell-fu than I have to offer. > > Go back through the list of bugs and feature requests and fix as many as > possible. This is an easy starting point for a new wxHaskell contributor. > Improve documentation. While wxHaskell is pretty good, it could definitely > be improved. In particular, I think we should consider finding a way to > generate better documentation for the wxC wrapper functions, which currently > only include type information. > > There's probably a lot more to do, and I welcome comments and suggestions. I > welcome offers of help even more, and estimate that getting into HP requires > a core team of 6-8 people who can commit to a few hours per week for at > least a year. This is a huge ask, but the outcome would be that wxHaskell > could become part of the Haskell Platform, and would likely be much more > widely used. > > What do you think? > > Best regards > Jeremy > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > EditLive Enterprise is the world's most technically advanced content > authoring tool. 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