[sldev] Projects that I'm working on (was: Philip's viewer)

[Alissa Sabre]

> I am a huge believer in transparency and freedom:

Me too.

> if you 
> are fearless about telling people early and often what you are doing, 
> you are probably doing the right things without needing to be told.  At 
> Linden most folks (about 85%+) publish weekly emails to the entire 
> company listing what their objectives are for the week, and how they did 
> last week.  Perhaps we could do that here too!!  It might be interesting.

Indeed.

The following are my projects:

* GTK immodule support in Linux viewer  (VWR-2261)

  This is the major project I'm currently working on.
  Subprojects are:

  * Porting my work based on 1.22.4 to the latest svn trunk codebase.
    Almost done, but having some trouble in XRandR code.

  * Isolating _too_new_ GTK features in the above code, as a
    preparation for the dlopen based re-implementation.  40-50%.

  * Thinking of yet another approach to live with very old GTK.
    Possibilities include: A raw GLX window in a GTK container, or a
    1x1 GTK widget entirely stealing keyboard focus from SDL window.

  * Also thinking how I can persuade Tofu Linden to abondon the idea
    sticking on the three-year-old-but-still-officially-supported
    Ubuntu 6.06. :-)

* Better locale handling

  Rewriting locale (as in C setlocale() function) related workarounds
  and problematic codes with a consistent and clean handling.  The
  goal is to allow viewer to run under the user's locale in most
  places, still maintaining locale independent data representation
  stability whereever needed.

  The motivation is to eliminate recurring problems, e.g., VWR-12161,
  VWR-11898, VWR-5365, VWR-5056, and pre-opensource issue SL-35450.

  I believe I have done 80-90% of required changes, but the viewer
  still goes wild on German locale...

* Pango based text drawing  (VWR-10131)

  This is my number 1 priority project in my mind, but I've not been
  working on this project recently.  No major progress in last three
  months.

  See the following page for more on this project:
    http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Alissa_Sabre/Pango_adaptation_in_SL_viewer

  My latest code:

  * Can draw most of the left-to-right scripts, including so-called
    complex scripts, e.g. Devanagar (Hindi) or Tamil.

  * Can also draw some simple texts using right-to-left scripts
    (e.g. Arabic and Hebrew), with or without mixing with
    left-to-right scripts.

  * As a bonus feature, dos a better line folding on languages written
    with no spaces between words, e.g., Chinese or Japanese.

  * Doesn't handle well text input features including typing, moving
    text cursor, and range-selection of a middle of a text, for such
    complex scripts and right-to-left scripts yet.

  * Also needs a lot rewriting to go into the latest viewer codes,
    because in svn trunk viwer font handling codes have largely
    changed.

Comments?

    Alissa Sabre

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