[XaraXtreme-dev] Xara LX status

["Charles Moir" <CharlesM@xxxxxxxx>]

I know some people are frustrated that not a lot appears to be happening
on the Xara open-source release, so this is just an update so you know
what's going on.

The Xara LX download has been updated again to 0.1c. This has the
following changes
- Soft Shadows now render (mostly)
- Plasma fractal fill types now complete. All Xara fill types now
supported. An included example document FillTypes.xar shows all fill
types working.
- Background rendering
- Caching sub-system (switched off by default as it's not very stable
yet)

This build does have a few known problems, such as the key short cuts
appear to have stopped working. But these minor issues are unlikely to
get fixed before we start releasing the source code.

Most effort is going into preparing the source code and documentation in
readiness for the open-source release. We're hoping (but can't be sure)
that this is the last update of the viewer before we start releasing
source code. There are a few places where we've got third party licensed
code, for example some MFC code, and we also use a Snowbound image
library for bitmap import / export support. None of these are important
aspects of the product and should be easily replaceable with open-source
equivalents, but of course we have to be sure any and all such code is
removed before we can release anything.

Some of the other areas we've been working on:
- Eliminated all GCC compiler warnings
- We now use AutoConf build system to streamline builds on Linux
- 64-bit support. We're also working on some type changes so we can
compile it on 64-bit systems. This will be a lot easier for us to do
before we release, than after.

Finally we're also working on preparing things like a public bugzilla,
and various website and documentation updates to provide as much
information as we can.

Finally, and I'm not sure whether this is a good thing or not, it looks
like the first code release will be more than a million lines. That's a
substantial part of Camelot codebase (oh and you'll start seeing that
name being used - it's the internal codename we've used for this project
from the beginning 12 years ago or more). That will give everyone
something to get their teeth into, but we hope not too intimidating (and
you can see why it's taking us a long time to make sure it's all
reasonably clean).

Charles