[fluxus] whats going on with fluxus

[Dave Griffiths]

> Hi Dave, all
>
> My future fluxus plans (can't say when yet)...
>
> I have been busy with developing our next big art project on windows
> and many of the libraries I used are shared with fluxus (guess why ;-))
>
> I'm now positive that fluxus can easily be ported to windows

excellent news!

> (barring the jack part)

jack has been ported to windows to some extent: http://jackaudio.org/node/13
but, the new modular approach will make it easier to port the graphics
part first, and use completely different approaches if needbe for
troublesome platform dependant bits like sound.

> and that will be the next big fluxus thing I'm going
> to attemtp. the goal is to link as much static as possible and
> deliver the rest as dlls.

this is something I was going to ask at some point regarding the OSX
version, but the same applies to windows - in that the new fluxus consists
of 3 levels, libfluxus.so which contains the core rendering engine, a
bunch of dynamically loaded plt modules that need to be installed in plt's
searchpath and the (now quite minimal) top level application/scheme
interpreter.

the plt modules are built with mzc - a crossplatform compiler wrapper
supplied as part of plt, I'm currently statically linking libfluxus into
the fluxus-engine module, thinking of osx, as I seem to remember that it's
hard to distribute dynamic libs. but however we do it, we are talking
about one app binary and at least handful of dynamically loaded modules
rather than one big binary for everything.

> Also I've imlemented many osx or windows or portability helpers for
> scons which I'm going to bring to fluxus just before I start porting
> it to windows.

good - is scons the right way to do all this still do you think? if we
want to switch to something else, now is the time to do it.

> I'm not sure if this project (porting) will make many people happy,
> but this is something I wanted to do for a long time now ;-)

fwiw - I'd like fluxus to be as cross platform as possible, and ideally
have .debs, rpms, osx binaries and windows installers built automatically
by the source distribution! :) obviously quite a hard target, but having
seen first hand the amount of effort it takes for newbies to get
everything installed at workshops, packaging is much higher up my
priorities than it used to be.

cheers,

dave