[Xastir] new Qt license and xastir v2

[Brad Douglas]

On Tue, 2008-01-22 at 08:53 -0800, Curt, WE7U wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Jan 2008, Brad Douglas wrote:
> 
> > Like I said before, let's leave this up to Xastir developers to decide
> > what works best for them.  We've both made good points they can reflect
> > upon, so let's leave it at that.  If you want to discuss it further, we
> > should probably take it off the list.
> 
> The current thought is to split the monolithic program up into
> pieces, with a daemon handling the transmit timing, interfaces,
> decoding, and feeding of an SQL database.

That sounds like an excellent approach.  Although Xastir is not
exclusively *NIX, the *NIX philosophy/conventions applies and without
degradation of portability.  It's good to play to it's strengths.

> The GUI would be broken up into pieces by functionality, perhaps
> something like this:
> 
>     Configuration
>     Messaging/Bulletins
>     Map
>     Objects/Items (perhaps goes with map?)
>     etc.

I would separate objects from maps.  They can share many of the same
properties, but I reckon it would be more intuitive to separate them.
YMMV.

> Once that is done people could port the pieces to additional widget
> sets more easily.  Care would be taken when writing the first ones
> to keep the GUI calls quarantined from the rest of the code to make
> additional porting easier.

Well said.  Anyone who wants to implement a GUI with their favorite
tools are free to do so.  This is something we've done in GRASS with
good success.  We have several GUI options (Tcl/Tk, wxPython, Java,
etc.).  Do you have any thoughts on a default GUI (at least as a test
bed)?

> Anyway, those are my current thoughts.  Other developers may have
> different ideas on how to go about it.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts.  I'm also interested in what other
developer's thoughts are if they can spare a few moments.

BTW, how many regular contributing developers does Xastir have?  I get
the impression that it is just a handful at most.


-- 
73, de Brad KB8UYR/6 <rez touchofmadness com>