Re: gEDA-user: Life and death for gEDA: portability...

[Terry Porter <techman@d2.net.au>]

On Sat, 27 Dec 2003 13:04:18 -0500
Bill Cox <bill@viasic.com> wrote:

> Hi.
> 
> Don't get me wrong... This is an amazing open-source effort here.  Also, 
> I have to say that Wojciech's efforts have been very helpful to me, and 
> definately reduced the porting problems I had.  That said, some ranting 
> about porting...
> 
> The dependence on various packages, particularly guile and it's friends, 
>  could easily doom this whole effort.  Imagine a random IT guy in a 
> medium sized company has been asked to install gEDA on 100 Linux 
> workstations.  What does he do?  So far as I've seen, a correct response 
> on this guy's part is to panic, and perhaps put together a resume.
> 
> Frankly, I doubt companies will standardize gEDA software for internal 
> use so long as the porting problems persist.  Given the pace of guile 
> development, this could be years.  In that time, there is plenty of room 
> for some other open-source effort to take hold and prosper.
> 
> I know none of us gets paid a dime to do this work, so we're much more 
> tempted to live with what we've got.  In fact, the rest of this ranting 
> is really just wishful thinking...  There probably isn't enough free 
> time between us to do this kind of work.
> 
> However, in a perfect world, here's what I'd do:
> 
> First, I'd design out the following packages:
> 
> -- guile
> -- guile-gtk
> -- libstroke
> 
> Instead of guile, TCL (probably 8.3) should be used.  It's stable, 
> proven, and highly available.  Even better, all you have to do is ship a 
> single TCL library file with your distribution, so the end-user doesn't 
> need to already have TCL.  Also, it doesn't try to take over your 'main' 
> function.  Also, TCL has been highly addopted by the engineering community.
> 
> As for the GUI, I would not write most of the code directly to Gtk 1.2, 
> or Gtk 2.0, or any such thing.  Instead, I'd do what was done in several 
> other popular and portable packages like Mozilla, AbiWord, and 
> OpenOffice: write most of the GUI code to a portable interface layer 
> that hides the OS, and then write a lean custom wrapper for each OS. 
>  This allows the tools to look like a Mac application on a Mac, and a 
> Gnome application in Linux, and just like an application Microsoft would 
> have written on a PC.
> 
> I know this would be a major effort, and probably an unrealistic one. 
>  It doesn't bode well for gEDA IMO...
> 
> Bill
> 
> 
> 

I have to disagree with just about everything you have said Bill.

Personally I couldn't care less about portability to other OS's, especially Windows myself, as I
have exactly what I want with gEDA and Linux.

I have been using gEDA for many years now, and Gschem has always been nice and stable (imho),
unlike Mozilla, AbiWord, and OpenOffice which have been very buggy and still have stability issues. 

Furthermore I have had plenty of issues with Tk/Tcl, and I don't see it as a 'better' replacement
for Guile by any means. In fact I avoid Tk/Tcl apps wherever possible. RMS once said, "Tcl has a
peculiar syntax that appeals to hackers because of its simplicity.  But Tcl syntax seems strange to
most users.  If Tcl does become the "standard scripting language", users will curse it for
years--the way people curse Fortran, MSDOS, Unix shell syntax, and other de facto standards they
feel stuck with."

As for the "random IT guy in a medium sized company has been asked to install gEDA on 100 Linux 
workstations.  What does he do? "

It's easy he just types "emerge gschem" under Gentoo, or if he's using RedHat which business seem to
love, he tpes "rpm -i gschem" ?

How about a Knoppix based live-cd set up just for gEDA, and saving to a USB thumbdrive, local hard
drive, or a network drive ?

I for one hope Ales leaves gEDA exactly the way it is. I know it won't suit everyone, and it's
impossible to please *everyone* anyway.


-- 
Kind Regards
Terry
* See my Gnu/Linux EDA webpage at : http://milkstone.d2.net.au/             
* Free Software provided by GNU; http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html