A Vision of the Future?

[CrazyEddie]

What follows is basically an overview of one direction that I may take the system in; note that should I decide to make any such changes, it would not be done over the next few days, but rather in a few weeks or possibly even months.

I must also say that I did not just wake up this morning and think what a cool idea this might be; it's something I've had in mind for quite a while, and there has actually been previous hints and mentions of such changes here and there.

The changes I'm talking about basically involve splitting the current system into groups of separate CVS modules. For example, we would have a Renderers CVS module containing all the renderers, with each renderer set up as a separate project. There would also possibly be a Looks module containing TaharezLook, WindowsLook, plus others in the future; again each set up as a separate project. The base CVS module would then contain just the parts of the system that make up the CEGUIBase library.

One major advantage of this approach is finer control over which areas of the project other developers work on, and the main advantage of this is that it's much easier to get other developers involved with specific areas; since they do not have to be concerned with contaminating or breaking other parts of the system (since they are working on a separate sub-project in a separate CVS module). This also enables developers to create extensions to the system (like new renderers and 'looks' ) and have their work easily included in CVS where they can continue development along with the aid of other developers.

I believe that this approach also has the potential to greatly accelerate the progress and development of the project as a whole; since once more developers get involved, it will enable me to concentrate on the core of the system while other developers can deal with other areas.

The main disadvantage of having the system composed of many sub-projects is that rather than having everything available from a single CVS checkout and compile, it would be necessary to checkout and compile multiple projects, while not a great problem for me personally, I can see others having kittens over the mere suggestion of this.

Discussion and suggestions related to reorganising the system are greatly welcome here

CE.

[_mental_]

One thing you may want to consider is moving the renderers to a Renderers sub-directory off of the main source root. This way you can have:

Renderers/Ogre/include
Renderers/Ogre/src
Renderers/OpenGL/include
Renderers/OpenGL/src
etc

then you can assign access based on an avail file in your CVSROOT module. For example to give a user called bob access to the OpenGL renderer all you have to do is the following:

avail:bob:cegui_mk2/Renderers/OpenGL

[CrazyEddie]

_mental_ wrote:
One thing you may want to consider is moving the renderers to a Renderers sub-directory off of the main source root.

...then you can assign access based on an avail file in your CVSROOT module.

Yeah, this is exactly the kind of thing I'm after.
The way the current source tree is structured makes this so much more difficult; I must have been having one of those days when I decided to have things structured like they are now

[kitt3n]

I think that structure would be nicer, and it would give
a better overview.
You could even make a \tools\editor dir and add the new
layout editor there

[gcarlton]

It would make it a bit of a pain to get latest. It all depends really, if indeed there is a flood of developers each working on their own module. I can't see this happening at the moment.

The main area that has attention will always be the core project - especially when Falgard (the data driven one) starts being implemented. The renderers don't appear to need to much more work, and the two current looks may well be swallowed up by Falgard anyway.

[CrazyEddie]

Thanks for the comments guys

Having seen the comments so far, I think we'd definately gain by a bit of re-organisation, although going so far as seperate modules would probably be overkill.

I may post a proposed directory structure here over the weekend.

CE