Re: Roadmap to Euphoria 4.2
- Posted by ghaberek (admin) Aug 30, 2019
- 1404 views
I'm wondering about the "include complete binaries" along with the wrappers for various things. Could there be problems with this? One I can foresee is - considering the slowness of Euphoria updates, a download of Eu is likely to contain an older version of lib n than is on the user's computer (if they do regular updates).
Oops, sorry, I was copy/pasting between lines and I missed that. I didn't mean to say "on all platforms" for all the external libraries. We should ship libcurl and libssh2 on Windows, but they're going to have to be apt/yum/pkg/brew installed in order to work on all *NIX flavors. Both of those have not had any ABI compatibility changes to date. (see libssh2, libcurl). Do you foresee any issues with compatibility for these?
That means there'll need to be a "smart" installer for each platform to prevent overwriting the new with the old. Even if the binaries are kept in a separate directory, and only used by Eu, somebody is going to have to keep the eu version more or less up to date with the developers version, because people are going to use the developers' documentation and wonder why Eu "won't do x".
Or am I wrong about this and missing something?
I plan to pull in the documentation to Euphoria's docs as well, and I think my comment and question above also apply here.
Secondly, what about libraries which are still "works in progress", according to their developers?
"libui is currently mid-alpha software. Much of what is currently present runs stabily enough for the examples and perhaps some small programs to work, but the stability is still a work-in-progress, much of what is already there is not feature-complete, some of it will be buggy on certain platforms, and there's a lot of stuff missing."
I didn't just pick libui arbitrarily; I've been following that project since it started. Part of the reason I picked that over something like IUP is because it's had a relatively slow release history. I liked IUP for this but they release a new versions about every six months, and it could be entirely different by the time we do another release. Edit to add: also, IUP only supports Windows and Linux, while libui supports Windows, Linux, and OS X. Unsure about BSD flavors.
My goal is to provide an absolute basic GUI library, akin to how Python includes tkinter. It's not pretty, and it's not great, but it's shipped by default and works right out of the box.
That's fine, and it will hopefully be updated "real soon". But will whoever maintains the Eu packages keep up as well? Will there need to be a new Eu version every six months, or what? Need some clarification, please.
I'm not saying these are bad ideas, just wondering if I have missed something here.
I'm not going to commit to anything beyond this next release. I don't know what the future holds and I don't want to make promises I can't keep. Eventually I think we need to adopt or develop a package manager that can suit our needs directly. Keeping library "packages" separate from language "releases" would lessen the burden if shipping the either one in a timely manner.
-Greg
