Re: [Texmacs-dev] Re: Compiling TexMacs on OSX

[David Allouche]

On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 9:31 PM, Abdelrazak Younes <address@hidden> wrote:
> Henri Lesourd wrote:
>> It seems to me that a part of your problems
>> stem from the fact that you did not followed
>> a 100% strict policy of designing *simple*
>> and *platform-independent* APIs for the
>> purpose of isolating the core, platform-dependent
>> part of the GUI from the rest of the reuseable,
>> platform-independent code.
>
> Oh we did that (not me actually), but decided to scrap it all. I just wanted
> to warn you of the possible consequence, that's all. But you seem to be
> pretty convinced of your case so I won't insist :-)

I do not have a lot of authority here anymore, but as a formerly
active texmacs developer with a bit of experience in GUI programming,
I lean strongly towards Abdelrazak's position: the right way around is
to have a platform-specific GUI drive a platform-independent core.

For TeXmacs, the core would be the
document-interpreter-typesetter-renderer-editor system.

That means that some stuff like menu generation and front-end
keyboard-handling ends up in the platform-specific part. They would
use a portable APIs to the back-end to produce the keychord
functionality or find how the toolbars and menus need to change
according to the document context.

In other words, texmacs developers should be in the business of
definining APIs for the unique things texmacs does, instead of trying
to invent a nth portable GUI toolkit API.

That's my two cents, nothing more.