[plt-scheme] Some PLT environment issues

From: Robby Findler (robby at eecs.northwestern.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 27 11:03:35 EDT 2009

Not to be a killjoy, but the devil is in the details indeed.

The wxWindows thing you mention (is a pretty infrequent) faq; I think
that there are more careful in the list archives. The short version:
no we can't take newer versions of wxWindows; we branched a long long
time ago and integrating the changes is difficult (nearly impossible)
for various technical reasons.

As far as the other aspect of your comments, we did try implementing
our own browser for rendering the documentation, but it was a lot of
work and we could never keep up with people's complaints (and their
comparison to their actual browsers). So we stopped doing that and
life got much better. I seriously doubt we'd even consider going back.

Of course (and this applies equally well to your other comments),
please feel free to do any of that stuff and contribute it to the
project. Our only source of funding is research funding (and, of
course, the products of that is research), so if you had a few
millions (or tens of millions) you wanted to throw at the problem,
that would also help.

Robby

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 9:56 AM, Scott McLoughlin <scott at adrenaline.com> wrote:
> I may be mistaken, but I believe that wxWindows (used
> by PLT, yes?) already has both a very nice "rich text"
> control and a credible HTML rendering control, I'd
> presume more than good enough to render text, fonts,
> some color and the occasional JPG image.  Hmmm, I think
> I even have an older version of the wxWindows demo
> program somewhere on my disk, so I might get around
> to checking today.  IIRC, th wxWindows framework
> made it very easy to put nearly anything inside of a
> tab control. But again, the the devils in the details,
> I understand.
>
> Scott
>
> Jens Axel Søgaard wrote:
>
> 2009/10/27 Scott McLoughlin <scott at adrenaline.com>:
>
>
>
> 3) Spawning the browser to view the docs is fine, but really, just as
> easy these days  is providing an HTML tab for viewing the hyperlinked
> documentation.
>
>
> The only complication here is, that PLT is a cross platform project,
> so it is a requirement that the browser component works on
> Windows, OS X and Linux. The last time we looked for a library
> to use, we couldn't find anything approriate, so it was decided
> to spawn a standard browser instead.
>
>
>
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