[MPlayer-dev-eng] The future of a GUI

[Ingo Brückl]

The reason why I addressed this issue was that lately I couldn't help feeling
that everything is fine as long as I'm only playing around with the gui code,
but that anything beyond is off-limits. Also, I wasn't sure whether the
long-term plan (as stated in my posting) that most certainly will cause
changes outside gui is a common aim.

Reimar Döffinger wrote on Mon, 14 Mar 2011 22:57:18 +0100:

> There is still a good amount of users left, I am sure they will be
> grateful.

I'm glad to hear this.

> However you are still the only developer genuinely interested. Should you
> decide to leave before significantly removing GUI "tentacles" [...] we
> would probably go back to preparing users for it's removal and most likely
> do it at some point. Hope that's neither unexpected nor too disappointing
> to you?

No, not at all. I've already put a lot of time into this and I'm willing to
continue doing it, but only if it results in something between MPlayer and a
GUI, not if it's only a permission to play around with code being scheduled
for removal.

> (note: more about GUI #ifdefs, I am not that much concerned about using
> things like the stream_ctrl functions, even though I'd prefer if it didn't)

At the moment, I barely have a complete overview of how all the GUI parts
work and interact. I surely know nothing about mplayer internals (but am
willing to learn).

Kevin DeKorte wrote on Mon, 14 Mar 2011 10:26:51 -0600:

> But this job would be easier if I had a better API to deal with.

I'm quite sure that starting with the process of seperating the gui code from
mplayer one's there must be some improvement that'll give benefit to others
as well. But so far, I'm concentrating on other topics and currently have no
idea what the interface shall be like. Generally, I like things being simple.

Clément Boesch wrote on Sat, 12 Mar 2011 22:29:40 +0100:

> If users see massive commits on the GUI, they will think it's going to be
> better, while in fact, it's purely cosmetics;

I really hope that this is not the way it is perceived.

Yes, there are a lot of cosmetic changes which are intended to improve
readability and intelligibility of the gui source code, but besides, there
are even now a lot of bug fixes and improvements as well, although the time
for really great improvements hasn't come yet.

Ivan Kalvachev wrote on Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:27:26 +0200:

> In worst case it would be good learning experience, in best case it
> would allow designing new interface that other GUIs could use too.

I see this the same way.

> Ingo, do your best.

Thanks for your encouraging words.

Reimar Döffinger wrote on Mon, 14 Mar 2011 23:42:01 +0100:

> Of course! Though we should still take care that the general direction
> makes sense.

Well, the general direction as I understood it is the goal I described in my
first posting concerning this topic. Is this is the way to go?

Ingo