Reviving wxHaskell (was: Re: [wxhaskell-users] [Haskell-cafe] Trouble compiling wxhaskell)

[Jeremy O'Donoghue]

Hi list,

Apologies for continuing with the cross-posting, but wxhaskell-users is not
exactly active.

It seems like there may be enough interest in wxHaskell to justify trying to
revive the project.

At present, from what I can tell, Daan Leijen, the principal developer of
wxHaskell, no longer has much interest in the project - the CVS log shows
little activity for about 15 months now - and using wxHaskell with newer
wxWidgets versions or on Unicode systems requires the application of various
patches (for which the interested potential user must search diligently).

Ideally, it would be best Daan for to enable new CVS committers to the
project (or even to hand over project administration), but if this is not an
option, is there a possibility of hosting a fork on hackage.haskell.org (I
think there's a benefit in hosting Haskell-specific projects in a
Haskell-friendly location).

I don't have the time to nurture huge ambitions for wxHaskell, but I think
it is realistic to aim for the following in the short term:

* Patches to ensure that wxHaskell compiles against latest wxWidgets
versions on Mac, Linux and Windows (exists today)
* Add Eric Kow's Unicode patches (exist today)
* Produce suitable binary packages for whatever targets we can get
maintainers for, compatible with up-to-date versions of both GHC and
wxWidgets.
* Improve samples and documentation.

In the longer term, we could look at:

* Fixing operation with sash windows (a personal gripe ;-) - easy
* Wrapping some of the more complex widgets - easy.
* Subclassing of widgets in Haskell (i.e. allow C++ virtual methods to be
redefined in Haskell) - moderately hard
* Move from the Eiffel wxc bindings to wxC project to give better
maintained interface to wxWidgets - time consuming, but easy
* Porting to other Haskell implementations (Hugs, YHC etc)

Taking on a project like this is a very significant commitment, and only
makes sense if there are a number of willing contributors. I'm happy to kick
this off and try to cover some of the boring 'administrative' bits, as well
as contributing on documentation and smaller bug fixes, but I don't have
time to save wxHaskell from permanent bit-rot. If there's enough interest,
I'll push ahead with trying to organize this.

Regards
Jeremy

On 01/08/06, shelarcy <shelarcy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On 7/31/06, David F. Place <d at vidplace.com> wrote:
> >> Hi:
> >>
> >> I'm having trouble compiling wxhaskell 0.9.4 under both ghc 6.4.2 and
> >> ghc 6.5.   Does anyone know where I should direct my queries?
>
> If you use ghc 6,4,2 under Windows platform, you
> can use my patched version of wxHaskell.
>
> And you can get my patch from Kamiariduki's source.
>
> http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2006-June/018043.html
> https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=168626
>
>
> I also know Eric Y. Kow's unicode patch doesn't
> include db problems fix. These problems has not
> only wxWidgets 2.6.x change, but also unicode
> change.
>
> I try to fix latter case, use attached after unicode
> patch, this fixes compile problem ... but it has
> another problem that can't use non-ascii characters
> correctly. So, if want to accesss DB by wxHaskell's
> ODBC, data is garbled and cause problems.
>
> I don't know how to fix that.
>
> Attached is already sent wxhaskell-user's list, but
> you can't get this file. So I send again.
> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=16222530
>
>
> My patch where I put Kamiariduki's project page doesn't
> include unicode support that I noticed above Mailng-List's
> log.
>
> Don't worry about this. You can use both my patch and
> unicode patch, if you want. These cause conflict message
> but this is not problem.
>
>
> On Tue, 01 Aug 2006 08:18:27 +0900, Jason Dagit
> <dagit at eecs.oregonstate.edu> wrote:
> > I've done this recently.  I put my notes on the wiki:
> > http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/WxHaskell/Install#Windows
>
> I don't know this problem when I made patch.
> So, my patch doesn't fix this problem.
>
>
> --
> shelarcy <shelarcy    capella.freemail.ne.jp>
> http://page.freett.com/shelarcy/
>
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