Re: [wmii] moving liblitz on

On Sun, 21 May 2006 21:53:07 +0200
"Anselm R. Garbe" <garbeam_AT_wmii.de> wrote:

> On Sun, May 21, 2006 at 09:25:17PM +0200, Denis Grelich wrote:
> > 1) Liblitz should provide a total abstraction from X11
> > insanity. The applications should not need to access any X
> > library calls, as long as they don't need them for explicitely
> > interacting with the X server. This would make applications
> > easily portable to any platform liblitz is ported to. Linux is
> > not /the/ OS (some say so at least ;) To accomplish this task,
> > it is necessary to provide a full-featured window abstraction
> > and widget model. It must be easy to use and fulfill all
> > requirements that dwm [dynamic window management ;)] poses
> > upon it. This is firstly: absolute values for the layout of
> > widgets should not be needed as long as it is reasonable. It
> > makes sense for multiline text widgets, but not for
> > single-line text widgets and to buttons only to a limited
> > extent. Then, widgets should be layouted in a dynamic manner
> > too, meaning some more or less extreme geometries (which
> > should be needed/useful for one application) should not make
> > the widgets unusable. On the other hand, in-window frames and
> > sub-windows shoulb be omitted, as they interfere with dwm. The
> > window and widget model should rather encourage to use
> > multiple windows that are layouted by the WM.
>
> I think these requirements are far beyond to what I intend with
> liblitz. I would like to do smaller steps. I don't think
> designing liblitz independent from Xlib is a good idea. Have a
> look at the cairo project where this ends. I don't believe that
> there are chances to replace X in the near future, thus stick
> with X.

Okay, sticking with X is alright. But as an application programmer, I
really don't want to cope with at least X11's drawing stuff. I don't
want to care about sizes, font handling, screens, displays and so on.

> The only way is UTF8 with 16bit types.

How is this supposed to work? Unicode is a 8-bit encoding, characters
can be up to 4 bit, and grapheme clusters can be as large as they want
(and you have to handle the clusters as /one/ character. Anything else
is just wrong.)

> I followed your implementation, and I think it is a starting
> point as proof-of-concept, but it can and it has to be done in a
> much simpler way.

Ah, yes. It is written very complicated, and lines of code can be
reduced drastically. It is just simpler to understand the source in
this form, and easier to split up if needed.

> I propose to do it in smaller steps. We cannot define an API
> before having a prototypical text widget which works well. We
> will need to implement liblitz twice in any case.

We don't need to define all of the API at once. Just step by step what
is needed, and adjust it if it is needed.