[wxhaskell-devel] Happy New Year, wxHaskellers

[Jeremy O'D. <jer...@gm...>]

Hi lists,

A Happy New Year to all, and with it a chance to talk about some imminent
changes in wxHaskell. There is nothing new in this mail for those who
follow the wxhaskell-devel list, but for users who are interested in the
evolution of the project, I thought this would be a good time to summarise.

First, there will be a new release of wxHaskell in the next few days. This
is mainly a bugfix edition, but also reinstates some features which were
lost with Cabalization. Specifically:

   - Styled Text Control support
   - OpenGL support
   - Support for building on Haskell Platform 2011.4

This will be the last update of wxHaskell to support the wxWidgets 2.8.x
releases.

Following shortly afterwards, the very exciting news is that a number of
people (Dave Tapley in particular) have been putting a lot of work over the
last few months towards support of the wxWidgets 2.9 releases. This does
introduce a small number of breaking changes as the wxWidgets API has
changed in places, but brings with it quite a number of improvements:

   - wxC is built as a shared library. This means that wxHaskell works in
   GHCi again, which has been one of the most requested bugfixes over the past
   18 months or so.
   - Support for wxPropertyGrid and associated classes.
   - Support for the wxWidgets AUI classes.
   - Support for wxMediaControl.
   - Removal of legacy use of Eiffel files to generate constant
   definitions. This is only of interest to developers, but is far cleaner.
   - Build system improvements to reduce 'unnecessary' rebuilding of source
   files - again, one for developers.
   - Support for 64bit OS X platforms.

We will make a release of wxHaskell with all of the new features soon after
the changes have been merged into the main repository, and have been more
fully tested on all of our supported platforms.

Best regards

Jeremy