Re: [XBoard-devel] gtk and x11 in parallel

[h . g . muller]

> This would mean you have to convert the main window
> including menubar, board and pieces etc from Xt to GTK in one go which
> sounds like a lot of work.

> When I looked at the Xboard GTK-20100806 version I thought it didn't look
> bad. Are there some problems with this version?

I thought the current version in the GTK branch had more or less done all
that, and that the main thing still lacking were popup dialogs / auxiliary
windows. E.g. promotion popup. This was one of the reasons for eliminating
the code for those from the X version: the current development version no
longer has a promotion (or piece-menu) popup with default settings, and
the X-code for new-variant, adjudications, common engine settings, comment
and tags popups have all been eliminated, leaving practically nothing of
them to port to GTK.

What is left are the eval-graph window (which is unique amongst the popups
in that it is a graphics window), the engine-output window (which has a
layout that was not supplied by the generic popup, namely two panes above
each other, and multiple label widgets above the memos next to each
other), the move-history window (a complex listbox), the game list and
game-list options popup.

The engine-output might be doable with the generic popup with a slight
enhancement of the capabiilities of the latter. (It can already do panes
next to each other, and label widgets on one line would be an easy
enhancement similar to the buttons on one line, which are already
supported.)

The current XBoard version of the move history window I don't like very
much, because it is hard to tile with the other windows, and offers only
limited info. I have been considering to replace it by a port of the
WinBoard version. This could then very easily be done by the generic
popup, as this WinBoard version contains nothing but a single text-edit
widget.

The current generic popup does not support list widgets, but the game-list
options dialog could be implemented with a normal text widget for showing
the labels, similar to the way the participants list is implemented in the
tournament options dialog.

I guess the most important priority for the GTK version would be to port
the X-code for the Engine Settings (= generic) popup. After that, a
zillion things that do not work yet now would automatically work as a side
effect.