Re: X is painful
Stephen Early wrote:
>>> Creating a user interface under X that is as good as NextStep is just
>>> a matter of getting every X application author to agree to adhere to
>>> the same policy. I wish you luck.
Herbert Xu wrote:
>>I agree that this is very diffcult. But the Debian developers
>>should do their best at getting Debian programs to cooperate.
Stuart Lamble wrote:
>This isn't trivial. As Stephen said, X provides the basics for graphical
>development; it doesn't provide any fancy schmancy stuff like menus, push
>buttons, etc. That's done by such things as Motif, xforms, Qt, etc.
>Converting an X program from one such library to another is a less than
>easy task.. so any attempt to produce a "uniform" interface is going to
>fail. Simple as that.
But we have some fairly powerful tools at our disposal. Probably the
most powerful of which is the shell command line.
If we define simple set of shell command line operations to do menus,
push buttons, etc., for our purposes, we can provide arbitrary
programs to fill those needs. If we do it properly (just focus on
providing the semantics we need, from simple commands), we should be
able to plug in new programs as technology advances. Note that, in
the long run, this doesn't tie us to X.
Simple technologies which may lead in the right direction are TK
(wish/wishx/expectk/..), and perhaps things like xmessage or 9menu.
I think it's a good idea to avoid being too closely tied to the
featurism of things like motif, or even xlib. [I think that patterning
our efforts after the technologies developed at lucent (plan9, etc.)
would be a good thing -- but I don't want to push this *too* hard.]
--
Raul
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