On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 12:36:18AM +0100, Lars Gullik Bj�nnes wrote: > And it is not supposed to be lcd of qt and xforms.
Maybe it's not supposed to be like this, but face it: it mostly is. Moreover, currently a lot of LyX's manpower seems to go into platform independence code that would come for free with a single Qt frontend - along with quite a few free gimmicks like XML parser, native user setting storage (i.e. transparent registry access under windows), toolbar handling, WhatsThis-style context sensitve help, and all of that with no #ifdef's in LyX code, completely transparent. The LyX GUII effort has served perfectly to create a clean GUI/Core separation. But actively maintaining multiple frontends eats heavily into our scarce resources - not only because some things need to be done twice or three times (thing GTK), but also because we cannot use state-of-the art in either frontend and divert a lot of effort into things TrollTech already solved. [Apropos state of the art: I just now migrated a bit of code from Qt 3.3.3 to 4.0beta1 and I really like what I see. The trolls definitely dropped the ad-hoc 'make this gimmick work' strategy in favour of uniform approaches to tasks all over the place. Not necessarily everytime the kind of approach I would have taken, but it somehow feels more mature than before. --- Wuah. It's hard to believe I wrote that given the half dozen or so complaint mails I send trolltech today...] Dropping xforms seems indeed sensible to me, even considering the amount of work people like Jean-Marc and Angus already put there, and also considering the fact that I am one of the remaining LyX/xforms users myself. Any minute of work going e.g. into multiple toolbars is basically a lost minute for the project. If somebody is doing that, it's just fine with me as long as it is seen as this person's hobby, but not as progress for the project as a whole. To summarize: Qt is not perfect, it will never be. That's a shame. I don't like lots of Qt3, I still don't like a few things in Qt4. Having GUII in place and using it for a single frontend is a shame. However, reinventing the wheel is an even bigger shame, especially when we don't have the manpower. So going the Qt only might be hard to get used to for almost anybody of us, but it is a very sensible thing to do. And if we keep GUI and Core nicely separated we'll always have the theoretical option of bringing the xforms frontend back the day we have more people working on LyX. Andre'
