Plot2Kill 0.02

[dsimcha]

== Quote from Rory Mcguire (rjmcguire at gm_no_ail.com)'s article
> dsimcha wrote:
> > == Quote from Rory Mcguire (rjmcguire at gm_no_ail.com)'s article
> >> dsimcha wrote:
> >> > == Quote from Rory Mcguire (rjmcguire at gm_no_ail.com)'s article
> >> >> Do you plan on supporting QT/KDE?
> >> >> -Rory
> >> >
> >> > Long term, probably.  Short term, probably not.  QtD is, from what I
> >> > understand,
> >> > not very mature yet.  I had a @#)#* of a time working through bugs,
> >> > inadequate documentation, missing features and general lack of polish
> >> > in gtkD and DFL, and those are (according to this page:
> >>
>
>>http://www.wikiservice.at/d/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id=GuiLibraries&oldid=AvailableGuiLibraries)
> >> > considered more mature than QtD.
> >> >
> >> > This is not a knock on the developers of these libraries, as I
> >> > understand that it takes time to create a mature GUI library/binding
> >> > and the situation is
> >> > continuously improving.  It's just that it's hard to build on that
> >> > unstable/immature a foundation.  Once QtD matures to at least the point
> >> > of DFL and gtkD, I'll seriously consider a port, but until then don't
> >> > get your hopes up.
> >> >
> >> > On the other hand, once I'm done refactoring things, I hope that the
> >> > dflwrapper and gtkwrapper files will serve as useful examples, so that
> >> > others can contribute
> >> > the code to do a port.  This should not be very hard for someone who
> >> > already knows
> >> > a given GUI framework well to write.  Basically, you just need to
> >> > create a default plot window and subplot widget, and wrap a few drawing
> >> > primitives in a compile-time interface.
> >> If you use the pixmap backend of cairo then all one would have to do to
> >> support QT/KDE is add an interface to control the second tier of your
> >> lib.
> >> -Rory
> >
> > In theory yes, but do we really want to have this many dependencies?  One
> > thing I'm going to insist on in the management of this project is that
> > there be no dependencies except for the GUI toolkit being used, so people
> > don't find it impossible to install.
> Could the toolkits it uses not be specified on the command line so that it
> only uses the dependencies you choose it to?
> e.g.:
> dmd *.d -version=gtk
> or
> dmd *.d -version=cairo_cli

That's exactly the way it works now, except that for Cairo I'm using the gtkD
Cairo wrappers, rather than "raw" Cairo.  As far as selecting at runtime instead
of compile time, this is almost a definite "won't happen" because IMHO it's
massive overengineering for relatively little benefit, and would make the project
substantially more complicated in both its internals and its public API.