Allan,
thanks a lot for your answer. I take this private, dont know whether it would
be interesting for the mailing list. Repost if you think its appropriate.
On 13-Feb-99 Allan Rae wrote:
snipped some stuff 8<---
>
> Just because we are aiming for support of KDE *and* GNOME doesn't mean we
> won't have any non-desktop specific ports. XForms will surely survive for
> some time yet (hopefully to be replaced by fltk).
>
Yes but this does eventually come with an expensive overhead, doesn't it ?
The ideal situation would be to use a library that provides native ports to
GTK,Qt,Motif,Mac and Windows and not do this layering all by yourself.
I am not familiar with OS/2 but I can imagine that a native Windows version
will run under OS/2, I may be wrong here.
Now on top of the GUI toolkit there can/should be desktop support,
which is where the next layer of problems come in, unless your toolkit
also suppports that. Question is, how much Gnome/KDE support is really
necessary.
But it is already quite obvious that there will be another round when the
desktop war will become a CORBA system war.....
I do not exactly know that that would be something that LyX could benefit
from.
snipped some stuff 8<---
>>
>> Personally I do not believe in a multi toolkit approach anymore. This has
>> nothing to do with LyX, so consider it somewhat off-topic, but from my
>> experience :
>> Toolkits are not really exchangable, because, as the state of LyX/KLyX
>> clearly shows, it is the programmers that have to relearn a different
>> toolkit
>> and that is the difficulty. it cant be done on the fly no matter how
>> sofisticated your interface is.
>
> I'm not quite sure what you mean here. We may be able to support binary
> distributions with multiple (separate) heads and the appropriate head put
> on LyX depending upon what libraries are installed on your system but this
> is something for 0.15. As for switching interface toolkit on the fly
> thats a very big task and one thats unnecessary.
>
Even at compile time, it is a big issue...
> The beauty of being gui independent is that someone who loves LyX and
> loves XXX toolkit will be able work on that toolkit and tune it and so
> forth with little knowledge of the rest of LyX. Thus with luck we'll get
> new developers and the rest of us can concentrate of the internals and let
> someone else worry about the interfaces.
>
But then you have to reimplement these features for each toolkit, or do
I completely misunderstand you here. You can either provide your own toolkit
independent interface to the entire LyX functionality or use toolkit that
ports to the native interfaces. As an example, what do you do if someone comes
with a beautyful new interface for printing, implementing things like page
ranges,
and so on and so on in let's say Gtk. Now you've got to reimplement these
things in XForms ? So you end up doing all these things multiple times...
Or you end up with different toolkit versions having different features which
will lead to Darwinian style selection of the best toolkit.
This exactly is what I find attracting about Wxwin.
>
>> Redoing a thing that already works is something nobody
>> really volunteers to do. And the question is always, why do it in the first
>> place ?
>
> See above as a small example of why.
> Additionally, the X-Windows community has moved beyond toolkit wars and
> has entered the desktop wars now instead.
It is sooo sad but very true.
> There are plenty of people
> who run KDE and expect to have KDE-aware apps running on their desktop and
> I'm sure there will also be as many if not more who'll want to have
> GNOME-aware apps on their desktops. Neither one is going to collapse and
> switch to the other desktop. So rather than see multiple forked versions
> of LyX I'm prepared to put extra time into gui-indep (when I'd rather be
> playing with inset code or dynamic re/loading of layouts or layouts in
> general or any of 100 other things).
>
I am quite hopeful, that Gnome and KDE will eventually move to a common base.
But that may take a long time. There are many barriers. It may also happen that
one of the developments will eventually stall, who knows.
> The one thing we can be sure of is that if you look at Freshmeat you'll
> see there are plenty of desktop specific software out there and most of
> it is a fork of an existing code base. What a waste of talent and time!
Yes, I agree.
> Maybe I'm dreaming but it would be a wonderful thing if we can demonstrate
> to the Open Source community and the computing world in general that it is
> possible to have your cake and eat it too: by providing a model of how to
> achieve gui-indep and avoid forked code-bases.
>
Well, I see this as another argument to go out and look for help in this
respect.
What do you personally think about Wxwin/WxGtk ? I must say I am attracted
because it does provide what you describe as necessary.
>> Shure XForms is bad, ugly, buggy , non-free, etc. but the reason it was
>> chosen
>> in the first place was, that it gets the job done.
>
> And Qt and Gtk never existed in those days. (0.10.7 was ugly but since
> early 0.11 I've found LyX to be no uglier than most other apps I use:
> granted KLyX is very pretty in comparison though).
>
Yes, and I want to add, that two of three applications that I personally use
each and every day are XForms based. Still these fonts anc colors and
everything.
The real problem with free software is indeed that many applications
severly lack feature depth, it is quite tempting to start a new IRC clone,
hack it a few weeks and when the real work begins just quit and leave it to
the bazaar. This is not so with LyX which is one of the milestones for
Linux imho.
>> There is from my past experience, coming from Aegis on Apollo Domain
>> computers,
>> only one reason that has ever forced me to switch toolkits, which was that
>> the
>> old toolkit did not exist on the new platform.
>
> Isn't that most of the problem here too?
> XForms isn't KDE-aware nor GNOME-aware and every distribution is now
> offering one or the other (or both) desktops. Additionally, lyx has
> disappeared off the redhat powertools cd (even though they still have
> xforms on it).
They will put LyX back on if the users want it bad enough. This is imho
a question of the target audience requesting it.
I saw only a little wave of new users asking after the 1.0 release in
the users list. Face it, Latex is coming to age, Latex users that are the
one big part of LyX target audience are much more present on the classic
platforms and nowadays they unfortunately moved almost entirely to Windows.
That is one thing that is driving me a little nuts, I must admit.
As a long time Unix user and Linux advocate it bugs me everytime one of
my established scientific contacts reports of his transitions to M$ windows.
Now what are these people using, I see a lot of MikTeX/WinEdit (sh$reware).
And though WinEdit is quite nice it is not Wysiwym. And LyX looeses because
it does not have three rows of buttons with all math functions and so on...
What am I advocating here ?
First thing, to get rid of as much unnecessary coding overhead as possible
and use the best toolkit available, that offers the necessary features.
Second, what you Allan are working on, cleaning the code by creating a thin
layer of virtual classes that interact with the toolkit, pretty much what
you are doing isnt it ?
What I would like to see as a fully functional version in the transition phase.
Would it be possible to link two toolkits in a transition phase of the
developer platform, then succesively remove XForms ? Would that be possible ?
Snip some more stuff (phew this is getting long) --->8
> Others (including redhat workers) have suggested the same -- only they
> wanted gnome only. We're caught in the middle again...
>
Actually thats quite nice, as for publicity I mean..
> The gui-indep work at present is quite tiring but it does serve a vital
> purpose (IMO): keeping the codebase together.
>
Yes I agree a 100 %
> Thanks for your thoughts. If anything its helped me to refocus on why I
> started doing the gui-indep in the first place (apart from having fun
> playing with signals/slots). With a bit of luck it might even spark a bit
> of support from some of the lurkers who want to have their favourite
> desktop supported to step forth and help get the groundwork completed so
> they can get started on porting.
>
> Allan. (ARRae)
Do you think it is worth starting to look at a port to Wxwin ?
How far is the code base ? Is the developer version still usable ?
Does it reflect 1.0 or will 1.0 features have to be merged into 0.13 ?
Regards
Roland
Roland Krause
Visiting Research Associate - Center for Computational Mechanics
Washington University, Saint Louis
Roland Krause <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
