[Visualpython-users] Windows beta: good news and bad news

[Bruce S. <Bru...@nc...>]

The good news is that I've succeeded in replacing the Windows-specific 
code in the beta version with platform-independent GTK code. This is 
what Jonathan Brandmeyer started with originally but abandoned when it 
seemed very difficult for developers (including me) to install GTK on 
Windows. In the interim installing GTK and GTKMM has gotten easy, and 
there are of course advantages to being able to debug and use the same 
code on all platforms. (The relevant GTK binaries can be packaged with 
Visual, so it needn't be necessary for end users to install these 
materials.)

I also hoped that this would be sufficiently different to shake loose 
some of the serious bugs that the beta version has on Windows. The bad 
news is that it seems to have made no difference. The good news is that 
this eliminates the possibility that the problems lay in the 
Windows-specific code. One area that is attracting particular suspicion 
is the new rendering scheme for curves, which was changed in the beta 
version but which I have reason to think is causing problems on Windows.

I have not checked in my changes to CVS. Basically they consist of 
eliminating from src/win32 all files but winrate.cpp and wintimer.cpp, 
commenting out most conditional includes in various files that were 
based on the compiler flag _WIN32, and making some minor adjustments in 
src/Makefile.in to the lists of .lo files for Linux and Windows.

Bruce Sherwood