Bug#91261: PROPOSED] modernized rewording of X/Motif policy
> Perhaps we should get the OpenMotif package maintainer's input.
> Gerd, do you have any suggestions regarding this policy proposal?
It's a bit more difficuilt. There are two major Motif versions: 1.2
and 2.x.
lesstif focuses on reimplementing the version 1.2 API (unless it has
changed recently and I did'nt notice).
OpenMotif is version 2.1.30. It is the OSF source code plus a few
patches from ICS (see README.ICS). The ICS patches fix a few bugs,
add a rpm spec file and teach the Makefiles to care about DESTDIR
(which makes packaging alot easier). The OpenMotif shared libraries
should be binary comparible to OSF/Motif 2.x (havn't tested).
As far I know, Motif 2.x is supported to be backward compatible
to 1.2 at source code level. I never had any problems with it myself,
but I did'nt do that much Motif coding. Some applications I've tried
(nedit for example) build and run without problems with openmotif.
For Applications where the source code is available I don't see the point
why a statically linked version is *required*. It doesn't hurt if both
are available, but I can't see any benefit either. One can build it with
lesstif or openmotif (depending on whenever lesstif works reasonable well
or not) and distribute it like any other package linked against the shared
library.
As lesstif and openmotif implement different versions and therefore the
shared libs have different major version numbers you can have both shared
libs installed. I can't see any problems here with distributing shared
linked versions only.
Binary-only stuff is a different story: 2.x should work dynamically
linked in theory, but I'm not aware of such an application to test with.
For 1.2 binaries (netscape for example) nothing has changed, we still
have to distribute the statically linked binaries.
Gerd
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weil in der Welt die Hacker wüten
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