Needs one or more people dedicated to doing the consolidation.
At least most of the stuff is now out in the open, so anyone technically able and willing to do it, _can_ do it. But I know that doesn't help those who can't do it on their own and are (rightly) frustrated by the perceived fragmentation.
However, note that there is quite a bit of consolidation going on. Many contributions are pending as pull requests against the "mainline" repostiroy. And both Atronix and Saphirion have integrated most of the contributions into their repositories.
GregP
It is great it is now open sourced and I think it also takes time for a community to build and organize around. For example when Blender went open source it took times to get some/enough people involved. My concern about fragmentation is mostly about getting the same behavior on all plateforms.
I agree things are on a good track though.
Andreas
> My concern about fragmentation is mostly about > getting the same behavior on all plateforms.
A concern I can very much understand and sympathise with. Ultimately, I think this needs one or more "champions" for each platform who are willing to actively involve themselves.
GregP
Is there any existing documentation around R3 implementation that would help any beginner to jump in?
Also, what's your opinion on using SDL2.0 as a R3 host ?
Kaj
SDL 2 would be a good backend to add
GregP
It would be a good backend but at the same time I wonder if it is not too much. SDL2 handles video, events, files, timer, keybaord, mouse, simple drawing, ... and R3 does many of this already. Mostly the compositor is what we miss.
Cyphre
IIRC Robert had some interest to use SDL2 as replacement of some of the host parts. But I think this is not small project. GregP, you have good point about the SDL based compositor. That could be interesting to try, but IMO it wouldn't improve the 2d vector graphics cpu performance it that's what you are after. Also I haven't researched if the SDL is modular enough so you can use only specific parts of the framework to have small footprint.
GregP
I agree it is not a small project and I would not be alone on this. The main motivation to use SDL would be to port the host to some other OSes like Mac. Also, SDL is pretty well supported since version 2.0, that's another plus.
Maxim
GregP, make sure you check out your private chat
Cyphre
Since we have R3 "view" on Win and Linux I'd personally like to find some time to finisih porting R3 "view" to Mac...there is only relatively small part missing so it should be much easier than doing the full SDL port.
TomBon
-- Since we have R3 "view" on Win and Linux I'd personally like to find some time to finisih porting R3 "view" to Mac --
sounds much better than opening another SDL bottle, what do you need to find this time or increases your motivation,.money?
GregP
TomBon, what do you mean by another SDL bottle, can you clarify?
Cyphre, if you think we could collaborate on this, maybe you could guide us?
TomBon
as stated above R3 is quite fragmented and adding another loosing end (SDL) doesn't help much. from my pov R3 is well positioned but needs a 'best of branch' unification. as cyphre said, adding the missing parts for mac could be done much quicker, therefore my question what is needed to do so. moreover, iirc R3 is already designed to switch backends (renderer?) later, e.g. agg -> cairo but since i am not deep into rebol atm i not sure at which state this whole thing is.
TomBon
another thing, is it right that there are 3 major branches atm? original, attronix, saphirion?
is there a matrix avail. to see the diffs (e.g. +/- FFI / encap / call / patches etc.) without checking the sources?
Maxim
we are slowly working towards unifiying the commercial Rebol Branches .
The idea being that this one: https://github.com/Rebol-Alliance should eventually become a junction point for the members of the alliance.
There will be phases to this unification and there will be several people from various groups, able to accept contributions. Note that we encourage the community at large to contribute, and when acceptible, these will be rolled in the next version.
Pull Requests will be reviewed by different people from different companies which have large code bases. The idea being that R3 needs to get stable at this point. there needs to be more collaboration and this is the first step.
We are moving ahead steadily, taking many steps to make it work. we are already 6-7 companies depending on how you count things and will be building up the project for all of november. I am aiming Dec 1st as a release date for public launch.
I wasn't going to go public too much for at least one or two more weeks, but there is so much going on with people talking about R3 forks and (rightly) saying something should be done... I feel like people should know that a few Rebol champions are doing their best to become team players :-)