[Mono-list] How to select a GUI implementation?

J. Perkins jason@379.com
Fri, 16 May 2003 11:35:10 -0400


Alexandre has been hard at work building a quite nice back-end system 
for SWF and System.Drawing. He can support multiple native GUI libraries 
including Wine and Gtk. The last piece of the puzzle is choose which 
implementation to use at runtime. There's two pieces to consider here. 
First, which implementation should be used as the default on a given 
system, and second how can the user change the default if they don't 
like it?

For the first, could we add a new switch to configure that adds a symbol 
to the builds of SWF and SD? Like USE_WINE or USE_GTK or similar. I 
tried looking at the build scripts myself, but being a Windows/IDE guy I 
couldn't make sense of them. Once this is in place, the package 
maintainers could choose the appropriate implementation for their target 
platform.

For the second, we thought we would check an environment variable, maybe 
"MONO_GUI". If it was set (MONO_GUI=gtk for instance) we would override 
the default implementation in favor of Gtk.

How does this sound to everyone? I don't know if Alexandre knows how to 
make the changes to configure so we might need some help there. The 
environment variable we could go ahead and add now. Then we'd need to 
package maintainers to choose the right implementation when they do 
their release builds.

Jason
379