Re: gEDA-user: Free Dog meeting report: Notes on the topics we discussed

[sdb@xxxxxxxxxx (Stuart Brorson)]

> It may be less work to target a cross platform tool kit like wxWidgets.
> Same thing that KiCAD is using.  KiCAD's short comings are KiCAD's 
> implementation, not the tool kits.
> 
> http://www.wxwidgets.org/
> 
> wxW already supports X, GTK2, Lesstiff, Windoze and several others.

My only comment here is that wxWidgets represents yet another
dependency (besides GTK and so on) which must be present on the user's
system in order to build properly.  wxWidgets -- and particularly the
header files -- doesn't come bundled with most Linux distributions as
far as I know.  Therefore, it must be downloaded and installed
(usually as root in the /usr/ or /usr/local/ hierarchy) before the
user can install the program he wants to install.  This sort of thing
causes no end of grief amongst newbies.

My CD is supposed to overcome these kinds of dependency issues.  On
the latest CD I have included the ability to make and install (as
root) the wxGTK stuff which is required for GSpiceUI.  I have tested
it and it works fine for me.  However, the install just never seems to
go flawlessly once it hits the computer of a newbie.  Newbies can find
an unlimited number of ways to screw this up; usually because their
machines are misconfigured in some obscure way.  This configuration
problem has been the bane of unix administrators for probably thirty
years or more.  Therefore, I am always in favor of minimizing the
number of dependencies required to build a program.  It makes
distribution and maintainence much easier.

Does anybody know if wxWidgets will be folded into GTK at some point
in the near future?  Will it be included into major Linux
distributions?

Stuart