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Re: gEDA-user: PCB HID project

Jakub Piotr CÅapa wrote: 
DJ Delorie wrote:

The HID pcb currently supports a Lesstif interface, which is very
different than the Xaw or Gtk interfaces (yes, this is intentional).
We're working on re-integrating the Gtk interface (which should be the
same as before).


And could you write something more about the reason behind using Lesstiff and Xaw in this project? Why is GTK+2 not good enough for you? Most of the code using Xaw/Lesstiff/Athena/Tk I saw was some old legacy/proprietary/commercial (or all three together) crap.

I'm not trying to evangelize GTK here but I'm curious why you choose other (not really modern) toolkits rather than the new ones (which should be better).

Actually, a huge goal of the HID project was to provide a clean break between the PCB core and the GUI. In prior versions, the gui code and the pcb code were heavily tied to each other. By defining the interface, DJ has made it easier to do things like have a native win32 GUI or a gtk GUI or a lesstif GUI. Turns out that exporters like rs-274-x (gerber) or postscript fit into this model.

As to why lesstif, why not? DJ has experience with it, lesstif has a considerable shorter dependency list[1], and quite frankly having 2 options under unix-like operating systems will probably help keep the developers "honest". I.e., it should help keep us from letting gui and core code creep together again. Oh, and of course he who ante's up the time and code gets to pick!

-Dan

[1] On a non-linux system you may already have motif and gtk really isn't a light weight dependency. Try getting a gtk2 development environment running on solaris-2.9 for example and you'll find a pretty huge list of dependencies you have to build first. For many users, the choice of OS and OS version is fully dictated by other considerations to a shorter dependency list can be a big benefit. That was the big advantage of Xaw. Of course Xaw had plenty of issues.