[Opengc-devel] new OpenGC repository

[Damion S. <da...@op...>]

Hi everyone,

A new - and I caution _highly_ experimental - repository is open in 
addition to the more stable repository. Oddly enough, the new 
repository is "opengcnew", and the server path is:

cvs.opengc.org:/opengcnew

Please feel free to download this code and give it a try. It represents 
my first crack at refactoring the existing code into separate 
libraries, streamlining the build process, and generally giving the 
code a thorough once over. If you have Doxygen installed on your 
system, this repository can be used to generate a more or less complete 
set of documentation based on my overhaul of the headers. The detail of 
the Doxygen headers is far from complete, so bear in mind that things 
will improve in the future.

Other rather dramatic changes in this repository:

1) The OpenGC application is built separately from the libraries. This 
helps to ensure that the bulk of OpenGC is standalone, and not 
dependent on the application structure.

2) The render window is now an abstract base class, with specific 
windowing interface dependent implementations derived from it. Right 
now this is just FLTK but I would like to have a native MFC class for 
Windows and a Cocoa class for Mac.

3) Gauges are now sorted by aircraft type.

Things which will be happening in the near future:

1) I've decided that the distinction between gauges and components is 
rather arbitrary and unnecessary. Components will disappear, in favor 
of a more generalized gauge class that supports nesting of child gauges 
(which is essentially the only difference between gauges and components 
in the existing code).

2) Addition of a garbage collecting "smart pointer" base class derived 
from the ITK project. Among other things, this will allow us to wrap 
OpenGC for Java and Python programmers.

Now, please keep in mind that this code is essentially a "straw man" 
proposal and is not the finished rewrite. However, I thought people 
would be interested in seeing it sooner rather than later. Comments on 
any aspect of the rewrite are welcome, it will be far easier to make 
changes now than 6 months down the road.

Things that I'm positive are currently broken include message passing 
in regards to mouse events and most likely several other things I'm 
missing. Gauges for which I am not the original author do not appear in 
the repository yet. Rest assured that they will make their return 
_under the GPL_ once the rewrite is complete. The main "OpenGC" 
application is and will remain GPL.

If anyone has issues with the relicensing of the "core" of OpenGC, 
again please let me know sooner rather than later. I have made my best 
effort to not relicense any code of which I am not the sole author, 
although it's very possible that I have made a mistake. Rest assured I 
will correct any problems of this kind immediately; the original GPL'd 
code remains available under the main repository for your inspection.

Finally, a few warnings:
1) This code is not as thoroughly tested as the main repository. I 
can't guarantee it will build on your machine.
2) I STRONGLY encourage you NOT to use this code as the base for 
development, although you are of course free to do so. I make no 
guarantee that this code will not change substantially before the 
official release of the rewrite.

Cheers,
-Damion-