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Il futuro
Allegro has evolved into something fairly big, really nice and extremely useful,
and some dust has now settled since version 4.0 was released. The library has
thus reached that point where every little addition or modification may have
side effects on the whole library: now that we have gone multi-platform, it's
not so easy to add features which are available everywhere.
L'esperienza ha mostrato che ci sono errori di pianificazione che vanno in conflitto con
librerie esistenti, o semplicemente che l'API corrente potrebbe essere migliorata se
fosse riscritta. In ogni caso questo significherebbe che il vecchio codice per Allegro
non potrebbe essere ricompilato con le nuove versioni, il che non è bello,
indipendentemente da quanti programmatori arrabbiati si troverebbero a dover
aggiornare il loro codice ad ogni versione della libreria.
Ma il sasso è stato gettato, e molti sviluppatori di Allegro hanno concordato che
prima o poi la compatibilità col passato si debba rompere, almeno una volta. E
quindi stiamo pianificando come dovrebbe essere la nuova API. Come programmatore
finale hai la possibilità di migliorare Allegro suggerendo cosa debba essere
migliorato, cambiato o corretto, specificando dove hai incontrato maggiori difficoltà
con l'API corrente, ecc. Non è forse questa una magnifica occasione per dire cosa
veramente non sopportavi di Allegro (non che ci sia molto da non sopportare) e cosa
ha disperatamente bisogno di cambiamenti?
To keep track of all progress in the discussion, a directory
has been created at http://alleg.sourceforge.net/future/info.html (there's a cache at
http://sunsite.dk/allegro/future/info.html), with the purpose of keeping all important
documents and design decisions, and to prepare them for the
actual day when a new Allegro will be written. Allegro developers
registered at SourceForge have access to this directory and will
put new documents there from time to time.
For user land discussion, you can use Allegro.cc's forum, where you
can freely post your thoughts, after a short online registration.
There's also a mailing list
at SourceForge, where you can browse the archives and collaborate
actively. So go ahead and make a difference. Remember,
however, that if you want your proposal to appear in
the directory above, you will have to format it in plain
text format and send it to one of the Allegro's developers
(here's a list of them).
Here you have an example on how to
format your proposal.
Finally, for those who might be afraid to use Allegro now because of all this
talk of major changes in the future: we know that there are many, many
programs written with versions 2.x, 3.x and 4.x, and we don't want them to
go to waste either. Therefore we are planning to keep Allegro 4.0 compiling
and to keep bug fixing it for as long as possible. If the new API turns out
to be not so drastically different from the current one, we may provide an
easy migration path.
Of course, development of Allegro 5 has already started. You
can see the proposed roadmap and follow its execution here: http://alleg.sourceforge.net/future/development_roadmap.txt.
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