I don't think checklists (as a feature) are going to be deprecated - in fact, Stuart is the original developer of and primary contributor to the checklist system - and the only thing he's been repeatedly mentioning over the years is that he's contemplating to use an alternate front-end, i.e. because of PUI (Plib GUI) restrictions:
Stuart wrote:https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/ma ... /29824616/Hopefully as we move to using Canvas in the future we'll be able to
improve the checklist display to include a set of
dots linking the items.
https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/ma ... /36292913/The PUI checklist dialog has a bug where selecting a new group
doesn't update the checklist selection combo-box. I've tried
various tricks to update it, but I think it's an underlying issue
with PUI itself. Roll on the new GUI
https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/ma ... /36937987/Trying to do something more complicated with Nasal and PUI is a real
pain, and I don't think it's worth the effort. One thought I had a
while back was it would be nice to replace the checklist function with
some Canvas window that looked a bit more like a traditional paper
checklist.
Note that some aircraft feature pretty sophisticated checklist implementations, e.g. the EA500:
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Extra_EA-500 ... ist_dialogNote that checklists are primarily PropertyList/XML encoded, so can be easily turned into a Canvas dialog - it would be pretty straightforward to do so using what we have already, unless people care enough to provide dedicated/custom widgets for a certain look and feel.
And in fact, given the groundwork by rleibner, Thorsten and jsb, there's now quite a bit of library code to draw widgets procedurally.
So, I guess this could be better moved to a separate topic - but I don't think there is anything missing to provide a Canvas front-end for checklists, as per Stuart's original idea.
And in fact, I can help with the coding part if people are sufficiently interested to provide the required artwork - however, all that being said, it seems that Stuart has meanwhile actually created a Canvas-front-end as part of his FG1000 work - so for someone familiar with Nasal and Canvas, it should be pretty straightforward to extract that code, generalize it and turn it into a generic checklist widget:
Thus, if there are folks who are interested in seeing a non PUI front-end (without depending on an optional dependency like Qt5/QML), their best bet would indeed be to look at the FG1000 repo and reuse Stuart's checklist implementation there.
I am sure Stuart can provide the necessary pointers to get people started with that.
Either way, I am sure that checklists as such are not going to be deprecated - and that an actual replacement isn't going to use Qt5/QML or QtQuick anytime soon, because that would mean that people without a Qt5-enabled binary, would not be able to use a feature that has meanwhile a long history, and many fans - doing that would be akin to providing other important features only to people with integrated Qt5 support, which would all of a sudden make Qt5 a required dependency, rather than an optional one (imagine only being able to run in-sim joystick configuration with a Qt enabled binary)