Jonathan wrote:
My immediate goal is to get patch 5 fixed so it can be released.
Then we could make a new official version based on patch 5 and release it as an official version. This is long overdo anyway.
IMO, the source to start any future work from is the experimental Allegro source. It is Rich's source with the integer math removed. It's a fairly simple matter to switch it back to the X11 GUI he was working on. Once I'm finished with patch 5, I can work on making it run. I was working on that just after I had put patch 4 into the code.
I'm OK with using the allegro version as a base (with some reservations about the license, see below) if we can make two fully functional versions for DOS and X. It's important to that it is thoroughly tested with all features intact so it can be a strong baseline going forward. The advantage of this approach is that right at the getgo the medium model is gone so we can make a memory management overhaul an early priority. The Allegro license is a bit strange. It looks close to "public domain". It looks like we could abtract what we need and relicense it (with credit of course), but I'm not sure. How much of the API are we using? Isn't there a GNU svgalib? Is that an option? If we don't relicense allegro, I don't think we can use GPL. We might have to use a different license. It would be good to settle the license stuff at the begiing to avoid trouble later. Tim