On Fri, 15 Sep 2000, Alexander Mai wrote:
> Actually a LessTif on the current level a few years ago would have
> helped M*tif in the opensource community. I doubt that adding things
> is enough to get people/developers switch back. A lack of features
> is not the _main_ argument against Motif, isn't it?
Motif has many features that are not used because using them requires
knowing X, Xt, etc. Most of the free software written as "open source" is
made by weekend programmers, this is the problem, IMO. OTOH, compare the
miserably poor manual available with GTK with the Motif documentation...
> (but may be: too big, too hard to code/use, no fancy default look, no
> C++, etc.)
"Too big" is a changing concept. For the current standards, Motif is
small. WRT C++, it's also a matter of taste. Pure C code is still much
more portable than C++ and some programmers, like me, dislike C++.
> Not sure what happened to OM, but last time I tried to build I failed
> miserably: read some docs again and it failed again anyway. Even from
> CVS with LT you're done with "CVSMake && configure && make" in an
> impressive number of attempts on various systems. As recently
> discussed our memory management is better, or to be more precise: we
> have less memory leaks (at least on the are of our simple test cases).
Some Imakefiles distributed with Motif are broken. It also duplicates part
of the bulding process of the X Window system, an error IMO because the
installation replaces some of the already installed X utilities. I had to
write some bootstraping scripts and fixed many bulding problems, but don't
know whom I should report them to (TOG, Metrolink, ICS?).
--
Carlos A. M. dos Santos
Federal University of Pelotas Meteorological Research Center
Av. Ildefonso Simoes Lopes 2791 Pelotas, RS, Brasil, CEP 96060-290
WWW: http://www.cpmet.ufpel.tche.br RENPAC (X.25): 153231641
Phone: +55 53 277-6767 FAX: +55 53 277-6722
