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

[Lynn Wilkins <law@acm.org>]

On Saturday 27 December 2003 10:04, Bill Cox wrote:
If one were to undertake the proposed changes it would also be an opportunity 
to code with eyes open to 64bit. A 64 bit gEDA suite would be sweet!
-law

 > 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