Some of us recall wistfully the adaption of a 1.0 vintage LyX from
xforms to QT in "a week" (or some other ridiculously short period of
time, was the claim) by one of the original core developers and, if I
recall correctly, one other gentleman.
I can't help but wonder whether GUI "independence" is a worthwhile
goal, verses the selection of an alternative toolkit, warts and all.
Likely to have fewer warts than xforms, at least.
Although I may be missing something obvious, I can't think of another
major open source development effort that is trying to achieve GUI
"independence". How did LyX ever end up on this quest?
Is there any significant benefit, other than the "benefit" of this
community enjoying the luxury of *avoiding* having to choose a single
alternative?
By "significant", I mean a benefit worth drawing out the process of
phasing out xforms from "weeks" (perhaps that's a fantasy) to almost two
years.
It should certainly have caught everyone's attention that one of
the targeted front-ends, KDE-1, dropped off the list recently.
I hope that no one seriously considers supporting the Windows
environment as one of the reasons. When I read that dependencies on
X-server are "a problem", I wonder if someone here is getting lost in a
vision (this one is definitely a fantasy) that a significant user base
will develop on the Windows platform, if a LyX on Windows (not Cygnus)
comes online in late 2002 or early 2003.
On Sat, Jun 09, 2001 at 04:58:26PM +0300, Baruch Even wrote:
> * Jacek Pop³awski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [010609 16:49]:
> > I was reading on www.lyx.org, that developers are working to create "gnome" or
> > "kde/qt" version of LyX. I am very interested, becouse xforms is one of the
> > worst libraries I have seen, and it's probably dead, now... I must use old
> > xmodmap to write "polish characters" (iso-8859-2), and sometime there are even
> > display errors. I just can't wait for gtk-lyx or gnome-lyx, qt/kde-lyx will be
> > great, too. But can you tell me - is it a chance, that I will write in
> > "not-xforms" LyX before end of 2001?
>
> Not unless we get a lot of help for this feature.
>
> Currently LyX has quite a bit of dependencies inside its Core on
> X-Server and the Xforms toolkit, it will take some time to do the
> seperation as it's a delicate operation.
>
> At the current stage most of the dialogs were converted for GUII, but
> they were not converted to the native widgets, that is we can pretty
> easily do them in another toolkit (either GTK+/Gnome or Qt2), it is
> intended to do the next stage after version 1.2.0 is released.
>
> a Qt2 or Gnome/GTK+ version will only be released (hopefully) during
> 2002, possibly first half, though as usual, this is a volunteer effort
> and so no real promise on dates for features.
>
> --
> Baruch Even
> http://baruch.ev-en.org/
