[mcclim-announce] [mcclim-devel] Announcing McCLIM 0.9.2 "Laetare Sunday"

Sun Mar 26 20:44:23 UTC 2006

The McCLIM developers are happy to release version 0.9.2 of McCLIM. It
was tested on SBCL (both threaded and unthreaded), OpenMCL, CMUCL,
Scieneer CL, and Allegro Common Lisp (ANSI mode only).

Get the tarball at
<http://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/downloads/mcclim-0.9.2.tar.gz>
or install McCLIM via asdf-install.

We are looking forward to your comments and bug reports. Please send
them to mcclim-devel at common-lisp.net. The list of currently known bugs
can be found at <http://mcclim.cliki.net/Bug>.

Have fun using McCLIM (and build good things with it),
The McCLIM developers.

RELEASE NOTES FOR McCLIM 0.9.2, "Laetare Sunday":

Compatibility
=============

This release works on CMUCL, SBCL, CLISP, OpenMCL, Allegro CL,
LispWorks, and the Scieneer CL, using the CLX X Window bindings.

Changes to the Install Process
==============================

Implementation-specific INSTALL.* files were removed. Generic and
implementation-specific Installation instructions were improved and
merged into the file INSTALL.

This release requires the "spatial-trees" library by Christophe
Rhodes. Get it via asdf-install or at http://cliki.net/spatial-trees.

Changes to Backends
===================

Copy & Paste code in the CLX backend was improved and should now
adhere more strictly to ICCCM.

Support for connecting to a ssh-forwarded display was restored.

Several unused parts (marked with #+unicode) of the CLX backend were
removed, thus restoring buildability on installations of clisp that
have the unicode feature turned on.

Double buffering for panes was implemented. To use it, create panes
with the :double-buffering t initarg.

There is now rudimentary support for entering non-Ascii characters from
X11 ports using SBCL CLX (a.k.a. telent CLX).

McCLIM ships experimental support for TrueType font rendering using
the FreeType libraries and the free Bitstream Vera fonts. To use it,
link Experimental/freetype/mcclim-freetype.asd to one of your
asdf:*central-registry* directories and load the "MCCLIM-FREETYPE"
system.

An experimental "Null" backend was added that should allow testing of
CLIM functionality without requiring a GUI environment to run.

Changes to the Documentation
============================

A new chapter on contributed applications was added.

Several new figures and examples were added to the manual

Clemens Fruhwirth added a CLIM tutorial paper called "A Guided Tour to
CLIM". It is available in Doc/Guided-Tour/.

Changes to Contributed Applications and Examples
================================================

New application: A CLIM Debugger (by Peter Mechlenborg). It resides in
Apps/Debugger/.

New application: Functional-Geometry by Frank Buss and Rainer
Joswig. It resides in Apps/Functional-Geometry/.

The Inspector now is now able to disassemble functions and inspect
pathnames.

The Listener can now produce vertically-aligned graphs.

The Scigraph application now builds on SBCL again.

A demo for drag-and-drop-translators was added.

Further additions to McCLIM
===========================

There is now a test suite, located in Tests/. It contains tests for
regions, bounding rectangles, transformations, commands, and the
PostScript backend. With the addition of the Null backend, we hope to
add several more tests for more chapters of the CLIM spec.

New Extension "conditional-commands": allows activation/deactivation
of commands when other commands are invoked. It resides in
Extensions/conditional-commands/.

Status of the CLIM 2 Spec Implementation
========================================

Here is a list of what we think works, organized by chapters and
sections of the CLIM 2 specification.

  Chapter 3 Regions

    Mostly finished. There are some troublesome parts of the
    specification that may not be implemented for all possible
    regions, for instance region-contains-region-p. There may not
    be an efficient way of implementing this function for all kinds
    of regions.

  Chapter 4, Bounding rectangles

    Finished

  Chapter 5, Affine transformations

    Finished

  Chapter 6, Overview of window facilities

    Finished

  Chapter 7, Properties of sheets

    Finished, though the correct behavior of sheet transformations may
    not have been tested.

  Chapter 8, Sheet protocols

    Finished

  Chapter 9, Ports, Grafts, and Mirrored sheets

    Finished

  Chapter 10, Sheet and medium output facilities

    Finished

  Chapter 11, Text styles

    Mostly complete.

    There is now experimental support for device font text styles (via
    make-device-font-text-style) for the CLX, PostScript, and
    CLX+FreeType backends.

  Chapter 12, Graphics

    Finished

  Chapter 13, Drawing in Color

    I am note sure about the state of this. I thought we were doing
    only full opacity and full transparency, but I see traces of more
    general designs.

  Chapter 14, General Designs 

    The composition of designs is not supported. We do support regions
    as designs.

  Chapter 15, Extended Stream Output

    Extended output streams are fully supported.

  Chapter 16, Output Recording

    Output recording is mostly implemented.

    This release ships with a standard-tree-output-record type for the
    first time. The tree output record type speeds up point- and
    region-based queries, but slows down insertion of output records
    by a bit.

    make-design-from-output-record is not implemented. *Note*: the
    coordinates in output records are relative to the stream. This is
    in conformance with the Spec, but not necessarily compatible with
    other CLIM implementations.

  Chapter 17, Table Formatting

    Table formatting is completely implemented.

  Chapter 18, Graph Formatting

    Graph formatting is fully implemented. The :hash-table argument
    to format-graph-from-roots is ignored.

    Support for a :dag graph type was added, as was support for
    vertically oriented graphs and support for the :arc-drawer
    argument to format-graph-from-roots.

  Chapter 19, Bordered Output 

    Bordered output is fully supported.

  Chapter 20, Text Formatting

    With the exception of the :after-line-break-initially argument to
    filling-output, this chapter is fully implemented.

  Chapter 21 Incremental Redisplay

    The updating-output interface to incremental redisplay is
    implemented. McCLIM makes no effort to move i.e., bitblit, output
    records; they are always erased and redrawn if their position
    changes. This is much more compatible with support for partial
    transparency. The :x, :y, :parent-x and :parent-y arguments to
    redisplay-output-record are ignored. McCLIM follows the spirit of
    21.3 "Incremental Redisplay Protocol", but we have not tried very
    hard to implement the vague description in the
    Spec. augment-draw-set, note-output-record-child-changed and
    propagate-output-record-changes-p are not implemented.

    Incremental redisplay in McCLIM may still suffer from performance
    problems, despite the presence of spatially-organized compound
    output record types.

  Chapter 22, Extended Stream Input

    The implementation of extended input streams is quite
    complete. (setf* pointer-position) is not implemented. There is no
    stream numeric argument, so that slot of the accelerator-gesture
    condition is always 1.

  Chapter 23 Presentation Types

    Most of the literal specification of this chapter is
    implemented. Specific accept and present presentation methods for some
    types are not implemented, so the default method may be
    surprising.

    The output record bounding rectangle is always used or highlighting
    and pointer testing.

    presentation-default-processor is not implemented.

    The presentation method mechanism supports all method
    combinations. The body of a presentation method is surrounded
    with a block of the same name as the presentation method, not just
    the magic internal name. The method by which presentation type
    parameters and options are decoded for the method bodies is a bit
    different from real CLIM. In particular, you cannot refer to the
    type parameters and options in the lambda list of the method.

    The NIL value of presentation-single-box is now supported.

    Presentation type histories are now partially implemented. The
    gesture C-M-y should recall the last entered presentation.

    define-drag-and-drop-translator is now implemented.

  Chapter 24 Input Editing and Completion Facilities

    with-input-editor-typeout is not implemented.

    The noise strings produced by input-editor-format and the strings
    produced by presentation-replace-input are not read-only. This
    could lead to interesting "issues" if the user edits them.

    Only a few of the suggested editing commands are implemented. An
    additional command that is implemented is control-meta-B, which
    drops into the debugger. add-input-editor-command is not
    implemented.

    with-accept-help is not implemented.

  Chapter 25 Menu Facilities

    The protocol is implemented, but McCLIM doesn't use it to draw
    command table menus.

  Chapter 26 Dialog Facilities

    McCLIM contains a basic, somewhat buggy implementation of
    accepting-values. There is little user feedback as to what has
    been accepted in a dialog. The user has to press the "OK" button
    to exit the dialog; there are no short cuts. There are no special
    accept-present-default methods for member or subset presentation
    types. Command-buttons are not implemented. There is no
    gadget-based implementation of accepting-values.

    The internal structure of accepting-values should be "culturally
    compatible" with real CLIM; if you have some spiffy hack, check
    the source.

    :own-window is now supported in accepting-values.

  Chapter 27 Command Processing

    command-line-complete-input is not implemented (the
    functionality does exist in the accept method for command-name).

    display-command-table-menu and menu-choose-command-from-table are
    not implemented. Menu-command-parser is not implemented, though the
    functionality obviously is. Nothing is done about partial menu
    commands. There is no support for numeric arguments.

    The command-or-form presentation type is not implemented.

  Chapter 28 Application Frames

    raise-frame, bury-frame and notify-user are not implemented.

    :accept-values panes are not implemented.

    frame-maintain-presentation-histories is not implemented.

    frame-drag-and-drop-feedback and frame-drag-and-drop-highlighting
    are now implemented.

    execute-frame-command ignores the possibility that frame and the
    current frame might be different.

    display-command-menu isn't implemented.

  Chapter 29 Panes

    Due to the way the space-allocation protocol is implemented, it is
    not easy to create application-specific layout-panes. Client code
    needs to know about :AROUND methods to compose-space, but they are
    not mentioned in the spec.

    restraining-pane is partially implemented.

  Chapter 30 Gadgets

    This chapter is implemented.

    with-output-as-gadget is not quite working yet, but it was
    improved since the last release.
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