OK, so I was thinking of what are the major changes that need to be done before RC3 (which will bring a complete feature-freeze until 1.0 is out).
I 'm talking about major changes regarding the SDK. Specifically, the managers and plugins interfaces.
Not much I could think of. Actually, none.
So I started thinking of what will follow after 1.0 is out. And I discovered quite a few major changes that will have to be done then.
For example, I evaluated
wxIFM.
wxIFM is a docking library which is sooo much better than wxDockit (the one we 're using now), except it doesn't handle toolbars (at least not yet).
Evaluating wxIFM made me change some things and found out that it was actually better this way.
One thing was the MessageManager. Currently it is a wxNotebook managing its pages. With wxIFM, each page is a different window managed by wxIFM. So, no more wxNotebook for MessageManager. That's a goot thing actually. We could change this now.
Another thing was the toolbars. As said above, wxIFM doesn't handle toolbars yet. So we would either have to use one big toolbar (like in earlier versions) or make our custom toolbars using wxPanels etc. Anyway this will be left for when that time comes. It's in the application, not in the SDK, so it can change any time. *But* what will need to change is the cbPlugin::BuildToolbar(). Instead of manipulating a wxToolbar directly, it could return an array of a special struct describing each tool to be added.
Then, it makes sense to change cbPlugin::BuildMenu() to work in a similar way...
About the cbPlugin::BuildToolbar() and cbPlugin::BuildMenu() changes, they will have to be performed anyway when we implement the ActionManager we 've been discussing of adding.
So, we have two options:
- Leave the SDK as it is now and change it when needed, after 1.0 is out.
This will of course completely break the SDK but will allow us to reach RC3 soon.
- Make these important changes in the SDK now.
This will allow the SDK to remain consistent before and after 1.0 is out. Of course it will change but changes will be minor and easy to update plugins. If the changes are major (like in option 1) then plugin-devs would have to maintain two versions of their plugins (one for 1.0 and one for post-1.0 releases).
But this option will set us back a while...
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Which option do you think is better?