Re: does glib use X at all.

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Bryan Patrick Coleman <bpcolema@uncg.edu> writes:

> On 25 Jun 2000, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> >
> >Bryan Patrick Coleman <bpcolema@uncg.edu> writes: 
> >> I have another question. Would it be easyer to port gdk to a graphics
> >> library with no windowing control or emulate the gdk api, and which would
> >> be more desierable in the long run?
> >> 
> >
> >Can you rephrase that? What do you mean "emulate the gdk api"?
> >
> >Havoc
> >
> 
> Sorry I always assume people can read my mind.  Rather than porting gdk
> itself drop in a replacement for it and wrap the replacement so that gtk+
> thinks its using gdk. This could be just as trouble some as actually
> porting gdk depending on the complexity of it. For example if sdl has some
> of the same functionality of gdk port gtk+ to sdl which already can use
> ggi.

GDK has "almost no" functionality other than acting as a portability
layer across different windowing systems and presenting a nice
OO API. However, we avoid using separate source trees for the
different ports of GDK so that where code can be shared, it
is shared, and so that we ensure we retain compatibility between
the interfaces 

The GDK in GTK+-1.3 has been extensively revised to separate out
port-specific and port-independent pieces. The CVS tree contains ports
to Win32 and linux-fb along with X11. ports to BeOS and Mac also
exist, though they are less complete and/or not integrated in. We've
been changing stuff a lot recently, so only the X11 and linux-fb ports
compile right now to my knowledge, but I think that the major changes
should be done at this point.

Your proposed port to GGI will presumably look somewhat like the
frame-buffer one, though you'll be able to use some of the GGI
primitives to accelerate things like line drawing and maybe text, and
you'll be going through GGI for things like mouse handling. It would
be nice to share code for things like window handling wherever
possible, but we haven't thought a lot about that all that much yet.

Regards,
                                        Owen