X-Mn-Key: MGR

Lately, I got more and more involved with working at transputer
software.  I use MGR daily for usual work and it is stable.  If you are
interested in a small window system with very low resource usage, MGR is
for you.  If you want to learn something about GUI programming, 8 1/2 or
an X11 toolkit may be more appropiate unless you want to rewrite libmgr
and implement higher functions on top of it.

Since a reliable event handler requires an entirely new appraoch, I
leave libmgr as it is.  Personally, now I think MGR is *very* difficult
to use for programming big and user-friendly applications in a race free
way.  This is the contrary to my point of view when I started with MGR.
Nevertheless, I learnt a lot with it and the current result is usable.
Perhaps someone else takes it as a new starting point, it is a nice
thing to play with.

I will still maintain MGR, which means that you can send me patches or
new clients and I will apply them.  Unless this happens, this is the
last release from me.  If you want to upload it to a more common ftp
site, feel free to do so now, because I don't expect much more activity.
                                                 [try broman@nosc.mil]
                              ----------

MGR, version 0.59 for Linux and SunOS (Coherent unfinished).

(Re)move any old versions and unpack src.tz (GNU zipped tape archive) in
/src/lbin and usr.tz in /usr.

If you don't like these paths, then use others, but remember to edit the
Configfile after generating it.  YOU NEED TO UNPACK ALL FILES FOR
COMPILING.  YOU NEED TO READ THE NOTES PRINTED BY THE SCRIPT "Configure"
AT ITS END AND FOLLOW THEM OR COMPILING MAY NOT WORK.  WARNING: I assume
using Linux 0.99.13, GCC 2.4.5 and library 4.4.1.

Finally the interface to the bitblit library is complete.  The server
now should let its fingers out of dealing with BIT_DATA on its own, but
use the bitblit library instead.  This means, by writing an entirely new
bitblit library, any kind of video hardware should be supportable
without changes in the server.  Clients which exchange bitmaps with the
server now finally got portable.  The semantics of colours and bitblit
operators need to be documented in the manual page, which is not too
verbose anyway.

The mgr library contains a new function, m_getevent.  It allows to wait
for either a keypress or an mgr event, using a timeout.  The code is
experimental and subject to change.  Its usage is shown by event.c in
the test clients and by mgrview and walk.  There is no function key
scanner yet.

Obviously to the pleasure of many people, mgrload now displays the bar
more similar to xload.

gropbm now can do arcs.

Since nobody objected, snap is gone.  screendump and mgrmag allow you to
save the screen or parts of it.  rotate is still there, although pnmflip
from the PBMPLUS package works more nice, because I got votes not to
remove it.

There is a new icon, sandclock.  mgrsclock really looks more nice now ;-)

eyes.c has been replaced by mgreyes.c, which is rewritten from scratch.
It is a lot faster and looks more nice.

There is EGA support now, but it is not supported by Configure.

                          --- Things to do ---

Libtex should use 8 bit width-aligned bitmaps instead of converting them
from 8 to 16 bit alignment in order to work.

The whole linuxblit offers room for major optimisations.  An easy one
(for people with knowledge about it) is converting the do_* functions to
inline assembler, which would save lots of procedure calls.  This should
preferably be done in the do.h file.

The portable sun bitblit library only almost works, there seems to be a
problem with line drawing.  To see it, compile it, link the MGR server
with sunport and start a big clock.          [client problem?]

The movie code compiles and partially works, but some bitblit command
are not executed when replayed.  Start mgrbiff to see the problem.

You can get MGR from ftp.thp.uni-koeln.de [134.95.64.1] pub/linux/mgr or
[134.95.80.1] pub/thp/linux/mgr, if you can't reach the first site.

Michael (u31b3hs@pool.informatik.rwth-aachen.de)
