Re: Google Summer of Code 2013

[marbux <marbux@...>]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 2:45 PM, Eric Wing <ewmailing@gmail.com> wrote:
> Google Summer of Code 2013 was announced on the 14th. Every year, we
> seem to bring this up at the last minute, so here's my attempt to kick
> off the discussion a bit earlier :)
>
> So how about it?

Two suggested projects:

1. A highly user-friendly, flexible, embeddable, cross-platform, and
compact Wizard GUI toolkit that works with both 5.1 and 5.2. The
NoteTab text editor's Wizard set-up has tons of good ideas (Windows
only).  <http://www.notetab.com/>. (The free Lite version has the same
scripting features.) The NoteTab wizard windows can contain a flexible
and reorderable mix of simple text fields, masked fields, multiline
fields, combobox fields, listbox fields, and checkbox fields.) In the
app, from the Help menu select Help on Clip Programming and in that
Help file the Clip Wizard and Fields topic (near the bottom). I don't
use this text editor anymore because its UTF-8 support isn't the
greatest. But I'll hazard a guess that roughly 80 percent of GUI
toolkit needs could be met with the NoteTab Wizard approach, certainly
for my own needs.

Nb., very few GUI toolkits that work with 5.1 have been adapted to
work with 5.2, and there's a big gap in coverage for GTK-based apps
currently using GTK 2 whose developers plan to upgrade to GTK 3 later.
Forward and backward compatibility of scripts are the major issues
here because of gobject dependency in GTK3.

2. I'd like to see some work on LuaRocks. Hisham has been working on
improving its embeddability, albeit he says it's slow progress because
of other commitments.  But I think it also needs some serious work to
be made more lay-user friendly for installation and use in the
embedded context (conceivably for stand-alone use too). E.g.,

-- APIs as needed for GUI integration.

-- Creation of lay user documentation that is easily adaptable for the
embedded GUI-fied context.

-- A setting and API for filtering rocks by supported version of Lua
(note that this metadata is not yet provided in most rockspec files so
an "untested" flag needs to be set for those lacking the metadata).

-- Other?

Best regards,

Paul