[Xtrkcad-fork-developers] Some project news and updates

[Martin F. <m_f...@us...>]

Hi there,

as this list has fallen quiet again, I'm posting this mail to let you
know what's been happening on my side.

Dave Bullis wrote to say that he has no interest in reviving his XTrkCad
project in the foreseeable future. So we can go ahead.

Personally I think we should rename the project now. As using the
original name or a derivative doesn't seem to be a prblem I'm leaning
towards a recognizable name - XTrackCad. Would that be ok for you?

On the devlopment side, I'm working on converting the available help
file to Halibut format. This is a mostly straightforward process. As
none of the original screenshots are available, I'm producing them in
parallel.

Basically I'm not rewiting the docs. just reformatting them. Also some
updates to reflect changes are done of course. I'll be traveling a bit
in the next weeks. This seems to be a task that I would on during long
eveneings in the hotel roomm. So by the end of April we might have a
solid starting point for writing new documentation. Anybody interested
in supporting that activity?

Also my adapted version of Halibut is in CVS now. I haven't built it on
WIndows so far but it works well on Linux. Part of the build process is
a Perl script that generates some files. This script needs to be
replaced as Perl is not that common on Windows boxes. I have no idea
what would be a good alternative for Windows, any suggestions?

If you look closely you'll also notice that I started some work on using
CMake for the build process. Building Halibut is automated with CMake.
Maybe somebody is interested in continuing work on that. I found it easy
and straightforward so far. Biggest hurdle is finding out what the
original Makefiles do in order to create an alternative.

I found a small bug in the Linux version. If you use the Turnouts dialog
  only part of the available turnouts are shown in the list box. It
seems that the sliders are not created to make the list scrollable. This
probably happens in gtklist.c - any GTK experts interested in looking
into that?

I think that's it for now.

Regards
Martin