Re: wxWindows and GNOME

[Robert Roebling <roebling uni-freiburg de>]

On Fri, 27 Aug 1999, Elliot Lee wrote:

> The main problem with this that I see nothing that would recommend wxGTK
> over gtk--. 

wxWindows is cross-platform and doesnīt require 27 GNOME libraries,
instead it provides much of the functionality of GNOME out of the box.

> (Which means taking advantage of toolkit-specific features is impossible.)

You can add Windows controls to wxMSW and GTK widgets to wxGTK, 
after all wxGTK just uses GTK widgets. Strangely though, this
has not ever been a request on our mailing lists and I got 12.000
mails about wxWindows.

> > I even had to remove its usage of the stdc++ classes as well as the
> > GNU libtool and GNU automake tools for its building system to reach
> > that goal.
> 
> There goes maintainability...

I expected that. I just read some report about the BeOS port of
the GTK library, from memory "we use a hacked version of the CVS
version of libtool....". This is what I want to avoid. Apart from
that does libtool simply not work as advertised, so my decision
wasnīt totally free.

> I don't like C++ for all this mess, but the gtk-- people use at least
> templates and think the stuff is wonderful.

No-one stops you from using templates in your program, but I have to
admit that this was a very discussed topic.

> > we included verbatim versions of zlib, libpng and libjpeg to avoid
> > forcing users to download them separately or having troubles with
> > wrong versions of either of them.
> 
> This is a definite maintainance nightmare. It means people using wxGTK
> will have stuff linked in that conflicts with the zlib/libpng/libjpeg used
> by GNOME, thereby basically excluding people from using GNOME stuff
> directly from wxGTK programs.

Itīs a matter of minutes to make wxGTK make use of external libraries.
Once again, this has not been requested a single time in the last year.

> GNOME has similar facilities, and people will just be confused if they try
> to use GNOME and wxWindows together.

We had to double some effort to become independent of GNOME. Why this
causes confusion is not clear to me.

> don't want to discourage you, but if wxGTK is better than gtk--, you need
> to talk to the gtk-- hackers and convince them to join you. :)

I never mentioned replacing or abandoning GTK--, there is certainly
room for both.

> I think the target "market" of wxWindows is people whose one priority is
> portability, rather than people who want C++ bindings for GNOME.

Yes, that is absolutely true and I want to make it easier for people
to write program that are both portable and integrate well in a GNOME
environment - actually, I think I have done just that already, but Iīd
like to make that even easier than before.

  Robert

Robert Roebling <roebling@ruf.uni-freiburg.de>