[vlc-devel] Interaction rewrite, OSX port

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

	Hello,

After multiple failed attempts at "cleaning it up", I essentially rewrote the 
interaction subsystem over the last few days. At this point, only the 
progress bar is missing, and I'm hoping to get that sorted out within a week.
The user string input is missing as well, but it is a non-issue. This function 
is only used by the OSX interface which I cannot take care of, and user 
interface plugins should really _not_ use the interaction framework.

I am well aware that rewrites are not supposed to happen during features 
freeze, but the point was to fix design errors. Those caused reproducible 
(and now understood) crashes and leaks.

The Qt4 back-end is ported and tested (on Linux) too. I left the old 
definitions so that OSX compilation does not break, but the OSX interaction 
back-end is basically dead code at this point. Now, I'm sure this will piss 
off the OSX (former?) developpers. But I refuse to ship known broken code for 
which we have fixes just because the OSX port is unmaintained. I can write a 
big revert patches if someone wants to fork an OSX branch with the old buggy 
code, but I would advise against it.

Sorry, but... to afford an OS-specific interface, a certain ammount of 
maintenance work is *obviously* needed. The other developpers cannot be 
expected to take care of platform-specific code, other than the one they're 
using. When it comes to Windows, I can cross-compile most of the code, I 
don't need to write separate UI code (from Linux), and I don't need to learn 
a new programming language... And we won't freeze the whole core just because 
one port is not kept up-to-date. We'd be going nowhere otherwise.

In fact, looking back at the (as yet unfinished) 1.0 cycle, I have to wonder 
_when_ changing the core would not have attracted complaints from OSX 
developpers at all. Early after the post-0.9.0 code melting was too early. In 
the middle of the development cycle was inconvenient. Before the freeze was 
too late. Nah. Lets face what it really means. We do not have any active OSX 
developper. We shall not blame anyone for being busy or having other 
priorities. Conversely, I did not appreciate being recently blamed for being 
active. And I definitely won't appreciate if this happens again about the 
interaction rework.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont