Re: [gtk-list] Re: To GTK, or not to GTK - that is the question

[Chris Bitmead misys com au]

>I'm talking about motivation. You asked why people write stuff with
GNU/Linux in >mind. Well, if I have a GNU/Linux box, I don't care that
Solaris has a nice CDE >environment and extending it would be cool. I am
concerned about the fact that >GNU/Linux does not have such an environment,
and if I wrote the environment in >such-and-such a way it would be cool.

One of the reasons that people are talking about Linux moving into the
mainstream
now is that it conforms to standards which are supported by other vendors
like
Sun, HPUX etc. I wonder if going off at a tangent is a good idea.

> When deciding whether to use Motif, the fact that most free systems don't
have
> it (and Lesstif sucked when Gtk started) is a big factor.

If Lesstif "sucked", when Gtk did not exist, then I guess there were two
choices:
Work on Lesstif, so that it didn't suck, or go off on a tangent.

>If you think about it, Motif has never been a standard on free systems.

5 years ago, UNIX wasn't a standard on free systems, because there were no
free systems.

>And Xt by itself is just not that useful or exciting;

Xt was never supposed to be "exciting". Just meant to be a standard way to
get
different widget sets to work with each other. There are truckloads of very
specialised widgets out there that can work with any Xt widget set.

>if you're dropping Motif and CDE, you lose little by reverting to Xlib and
>starting over from there. Most people hacking Gtk apps were never Motif
>programmers, so their was no lost-expertise cost in that respect.

Most people hacking on personal computers never used to be UNIX
programmers.
They hacked Apple IIs and C64s and Trash-80s. But adopting an existing
standard was a good idea. It brought everybody together - hackers,
commercial
vendors, UNIX programmers. There ARE Motif programmers out there (lots of
them
of which I am one).

>Basically there was much to gain and little to lose by dropping Motif.


It seems like there is a lot to lose to me. Don't take this as a flame. It

may be worth it. Maybe I will find out why as I start to use GTK. But it
      just

looks to me at the moment like gratuitously breaking standards. It's not
      clear

to me right now what exactly could possibly have been gained that couldn't
      have

been done by extending what was standard out there already. There's just so

many X11 widget sets out there, it's crazy.