[Opengc-devel] some changes to OpenGC

[Damion S. <dam...@ho...>]

Hi everyone,

I've been working on making the CVS repository of OpenGC run under Linux and 
have run into a few issues...

Most importantly, I've become increasingly frustrated with using Glut as the 
window manager. Little has been done on the code in the past few years, and 
because of the restrictive license it was distributed under, this is 
unlikely to change. Glut also provides little in terms of an application 
framework (decent menus for instance).

I have been working with the Fast-Light Toolkit (FLTK) at my day job for the 
past year and have decided it's the "way of the future" for OpenGC. Not only 
is it a more modern code-base, it provides (should we want it) a menuing 
interface, more advanced mouse interactions, and a number of other cool 
features.

How will this affect you? Well, you won't need Glut anymore to build and run 
OpenGC. On the other hand, you will need to download and build FLTK. This is 
a very straightforward process, on both Windows and Linux, and takes only a 
few minutes. CMake will find the FLTK installation and set up the 
directories for you (under Windows you may need to use the interface to 
select the root FLTK directory once, but it will be remembered after that).

Hopefully, this conversion will go relatively smoothly. I don't like mucking 
with the fundamentals of OpenGC, but in this case I think it's for the 
better.

On a possiblly more controversial note, I think that the time has come to 
enforce the use of CMake as the the only allowable build tool for OpenGC. 
The alternate makefiles have not been updated for quite some time and are 
not able to build OpenGC in its current state (even before the changes to 
support FLTK). Unless someone volunteers to maintain them on a regular 
basis, I think they should be removed to avoid confusion.

I have not committed any of these changes to the repository yet, so speak 
now.... comments are welcome as always.

Cheers,
-Damion-


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