Re: WX_XT

[Matthew Flatt <mflatt@cs.utah.edu>]

Quoting Brent Fulgham:
> From what I understand, DrScheme builds against its own
> copy of Wx Windows.  

Yes.

> I was wondering if special modifications
> to Wx Windows were required to interact with MzScheme,
> or if there just has not been time to bring DrScheme
> up-to-date with the latest version of Wx Windows.

We branched long ago, then significantly revised many parts of
wxWindows. We cut out a lot of stuff that we don't need (e.g., geometry
management, certain kinds of GUI objects, filesystem utilities covered
better by MzScheme), and we added some stuff that we do need (e.g., GC
annotations, eventspace support).

We tried tracking (and contributing to) the standard distribution for a
year or so, but spent too much time coordinating unruly code. Contrary
to any sane expectation, it turned out to be simpler to discover and
fix all the MrEd-relevant bugs ourselves.

wxWindows eventually moved on to version 2.0, which is probably much
better code than what we started with (1.51 or so). At this point,
though, there's really no hope of making MrEd work with the normal
wxWindows distribution.

> I'm having trouble with the Debian autobuilders, because
> the Makefile's generated in configure do not properly isolate
> the build tree from the canonical include/library search
> paths, which causes MrEd to attempt to link and build
> against the wrong versions of Wx Windows.

Sounds like there's something about our makefile templates that we can
change to fix this problem. I don't know what that would be (the
makefiles expect -I override default search paths), so let me know what
to change.

Matthew