[CF-Devel] troubles with crossedit & libXaw

[Mark Wedel]

Andreas Vogl wrote:
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      The troubles we have is that CE is crashing in various functions
     
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      of the Xaw-library. Looks like the latest xaw does no longer
     
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      fit for CE. This is *very* bad, since it might affect most, maybe
     
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      all up-to-date linux systems.
     
     
 This would seem odd, as most libraries try to be backwards compatible, but I'll
take your word for it.  Crossedit is quite old, and is very possible that some
features it uses it uses are now long supported in the library.

 Also, crossedit has had some reliability problems for a long time - perhaps the
newer Xaw library just exploints it more (if you had several maps open and
update on object on one, it would sometimes update the 'need to be saved flag'
on a different map, and crashes were more likely with multiple maps open

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      If there is no way to fix these troubles except downgrading the
     
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      Xaw lib, I believe it really is time to re-write CE !
     
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      We need a better user-interface anyways, as well as hardcoded
     
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      png-support.
     
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      I know that this is very easy to say while much work to do.
     
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      But without a well-working editor, no way to get new maps...
     
     
 Just a note - the latest CVS crossedit does have png support.

 the obvious question is whether someone wants to spend the time to write a new
crossedit.  To me, it mostly needs to be fairly abstract (be able to
insert/remove objects) - as a first pass, to change variables you could use the
current set variable function like the current editor does and not provide
pre-defined widgets for certain things, and add those widgets as we go along.

 If it is decided to write a new crossedit, there are the following
considerations:
1) Should it be one client for all platforms, or should it have a common set of
base code with perhaps native gui's for each one?  If the former, that means we
need a portable gui interface (java or a library that is cross platform and
hopefully not too obscure on the unix side of things).
2) For simplicity, might as well only make it support png images.
3) List of features the client really needs.  The only thing I would add would
be the ability to follow connected objects.  Ie, I select a handle in the map,
and say follow, and it finds the next connected object with the same connected
value and makes the seleected, I say follow again, and it goes to the next one,
and so on.  The hardest thing I usually have with maps is trying to figure out
how the handles/buttons/whatever interace with each other.
 Actually, one other thing would be to search objects base on something (ie,
slaying of whatever) so you would find out where that key to the door is or
whatever.


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      Andreas V.
     
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