At 12:08 AM 3/14/00 +0000, Aaron Lehmann wrote:
>I was suprised to read that the GTK+/Win32 version needed an X server.
Remember, this is a *hack*. Tom did some makefile magic to get the unix
version to build and run inside cygwin as if it were yet another unix
platform. Essentially he's augmented the cygwin environment to be
sufficiently X-like to get AbiWord up and running.
The fact that Windows is running somewhere underneath cygwin is completely
lost on this (highly exotic) variant of AbiWord.
>I
>had thought that the win32 port of GTK wan natively on windows.
That's a different story. There is a port of GTK which can be used to
generate native Windows applications. AFAIK, its main use is to get the
GIMP up and running, which already is quite an accomplishment.
To my knowledge, nobody has attempted to get AbiWord building using that
configuration.
>According
>to Miguel de Icaza, "The mistake AbiWord made was to not use GTK for its
>cross platform toolkit." GTK runs on BeOS, Unix, and Windows, so
>theoretically it could eliminate a lot of the non-xp work.
Yep. That's Miguel's theory all right. So far, nobody (including Miguel)
has tested it, so it's not clear how native the look and feel for GTK apps
on non-Unix platforms will be. Ditto for the usual performance questions
that come up for any XP development strategy.
The GIMP's UI design is so aggressively Unix-ish (and un-Windows-like) that
it's not necessarily a good test, either.
For obvious reasons, I continue to feel quite comfortable with our current
XP strategy, but that's just me:
http://www.abisource.com/talks/lwce2000ny/index.phtml
Anyone interested in testing these theories should definitely submit patches
when they're done.
Paul
