Re: [Fractdev] Re: New substantially improved version

On Tue, Feb 19, 2008 at 04:53:26PM -0600, Jonathan Osuch wrote:
>
> If we have X11 is there still a need for ncurses? Disk video?
> Platforms that don't support X11?
>

Since the pure X11 port already has more functionality than the ncurses
version (and seems at least as reliable), the NCURSES switches
can be completely removed, except for the Disk video functionality. The point
is, does one want to have (x)fractint being able to do batch processing
without X11 ? This probably has never been the intent. If not, then
all the NCURSES and Disk video stuff can be removed.

The only important Unix platform which does not have X11 natively is
MacOS X. However MacOS X ships X11 more or less as a standard add-on.
This means that the pure X11 xfractint version will run quite
easily on MacOS X. Porting it to a pure Cocoa version (the native
graphics layer of MacOS X) would even be easier now, since one would
just have to translate the video procedures from the unix/ directory,
including xfcurses. However, this would be a substantial work - about
twice as much as what I did with xfcurses. You'd better ask a Cocoa
expert ...

Regards,
Jean-Pierre Demailly
(author of the new pure X11 "xfcurses" routines)