[mcclim-devel] Announcing McCLIM 0.9.1 - "Mothering Sunday"

Sun Mar 6 22:08:32 UTC 2005

The McCLIM developers are happy to release version 0.9.1 of McCLIM. It
was extensively tested on SBCL (threaded and unthreaded), OpenMCL and
CMUCL. It's also known to work with Allegro Common Lisp (tested with
6.2 Trial Edition). Lots of things changed since the last release, so
I appended the release notes after the announcement.

We're hoping to make this release the first in a series of time-boxed
releases of McCLIM. You can get a tarball at
<http://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/downloads/mcclim-0.9.1.tar.gz>.

Of course, we are looking forward to comments and bug reports. Please
direct these at mcclim-devel <at> common-lisp.net. The current list of
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 0.9.1 - "Mothering Sunday":

Changes to the McCLIM Installation Process
==========================================

McCLIM now comes with a native ASDF system definition in mcclim.asd,
along with the traditional (still ASDF-compatible) system.lisp. See
INSTALL.ASDF for details.

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

Support for Copy&Paste of selections (both into and out from McCLIM
applications) in the X11 backend was added. Copying text from McCLIM
into some applications (and vice versa) like KDE's Konsole is broken,
unfortunately. Shift + left-mouse-drag and Shift + mouse-middle-down
now activate a selection and paste in your McCLIM application,
respectively.

There is now rudimentary support for printing non-Latin1 characters to
X11 ports on SBCL.

Beagle, A new experimental backend using Mac OS X's Cocoa bindings was
added. Note that this backend is still incomplete and breaks in some
places. It is not loaded automatically. To try it out, consult
Backends/beagle/README.

Changes to the Manual
=====================

A chapter on presentation types was added.

The chapter on command tables was improved.

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

Clouseau, a graphical Inspector application was added.

The CLIM Listener saw many improvements, among these: package
graphing, better directory stack handling and a new Edit Definition
command.

A Method Browser was added to the examples.

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

    Finished

  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. We do not have a true
    standard-tree-output-record type or the R-tree type of real CLIM,
    so some operations may be slow with lots of output
    records. 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.

    There is now a protocol in place for Drag-and-Drop of output
    records.

    Output recording inside formatting-tables now works.

  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.

  Chapter 19, Bordered Output 

    Bordered output is fully supported.
    The :move-cursor argument to surrounding-output-with-border is now
    working.

  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 can suffer from performance
    problems because there are no spatially-organized compound
    output record types.

    The generic function incremental-redisplay is now implemented.

  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.

    drag-output-record and dragging-output are now implemented.

  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 "Exit" 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. own-window is not
    supported.

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

  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,
    frame-drag-and-drop-feedback and frame-drag-and-drop-highlighting
    are not implemented.

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

    display-command-menu isn't implemented.

    command-enabled is now 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.