On Thu, 2010-09-02 at 07:39 -0300, Juan Vuletich wrote:
> Hi Ross,
> 
> You did a great analysis of the situation and issues involved. (more 
> interleaved)
> 
> On 02/09/2010 02:16 a.m., Ross Boylan wrote:
> > I've been working on some personal projects for which I'd like to
> use
> > Magma and BobsUI.  Maui might be an alternative or supplement to
> BobsUI.
> > Additionally I want to make an autocompletion widget.
> >
> > I would appreciate any advice or insights into the best way to
> combine
> > these elements.  Broadly, the choices seem to be
> > 1. Start with squeak 4.1 and attempt to modify the text editing
> system
> > to match Cuis.  magma, maui (?) and bobsui all work in 4.1.  Work on
> > autocompletion after merging in the Cuis changes.
> >
.......
> >
> > Options 1, 2, and 3 above all seem to involve considerable work, of
> > unknown size.  The fact that the more recent Cuis work on text
> editing
> > is not in mainline (AFAIK) suggests the merge is not trivial(*) (1
> is
> > hard).
> 
> As Andreas said in another response to this thread, the reason is not 
> that the merge is hard. It is essentially because nobody attempted to
> do 
> it. I believe that the effort already done to switch to the new
> editors 
> (reorganizing the hierarchy and clean it of the Controller protocol)
> is 
> bigger than the next step (remove direct use of Sensor). So, merging 
> this into Squeak is advisable and not that hard.
That sounds encouraging.  However, such a merge might involve several
layers of issues.  The first is getting the basic text editing switched
over.  That's the main thing I'm concerned with, and that may be what
you were thinking of when you said it was not that hard.  Even there,
the work would need to be extended to handle Unicode.  Second, this
might disrupt various tools, in particular ToolBuilder.  Third, since
the current auto-completion framework uses the old text editing
framework, it seems likely it will break.  Perhaps, at least as a
transitional thing, it could continue to use the old code.

The work Juan has done simplifying the editors is absolutely fantastic,
and I'd like to publicly thank and congratulate him.  While the
completion framework shows that some people have been able to comprehend
and extend it, I think the new code is much easier to understand and
extend.

Ross