Re: Motif support

[Óscar Fuentes]

Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> writes:

>> "Lucid" is just the widget library used to interface with (partially)
>> both Motif and the variants of Athena widgets.
>>
>> Both the Motif build and the "Lucid" build use the Lucid library.  Even
>> the GTK build, PGTK port, NS port and W32 port use parts of the Lucid
>> library for handling menus.  The only GUI port that is completely free
>> of lwlib is the Haiku port.
>
> In short: you (and many other people who have not worked with the X
> port)

I looked at the sources and quickly decided that I would only work with
that under duress.

> are grossly overstating the amount of work needed to keep the
> Motif build working, and how difficult it is to comprehend.

I'm afraid that on this topic there are a lot of self-fulling prophecies
and selection biases. Whenever somebody mentions the complexity of the
source, some seasoned hacker pops up saying that the assessment is
wrong, without realizing that he is precisely the worst placed person to
dispute the assessment.

> New hackers will likely have much more trouble understanding the GTK
> code than the code for a well-behaved X toolkit such as Motif.

New hackers probably are more comfortable with GTK than with legacy X
libraries.

> IME, they will also have more difficulties understanding X in general,
> which is quite different from other contemporary window systems.

Yes.

> For example, do you really understand what we do in `XTflash' with the
> various versions of GTK and Cairo?

I prefer to keep those horrible thoughts out of my mind ;-)

> I apologize in advance if this reply appears to have an accausatory
> tone: if it does, I didn't intend for it to be that way, but I couldn't
> find another wording that would get the point accross.

No worries, I understand your position. On the past I supported Eli he
objected to removing the DOS port, so I say the same on your case: if
that is the price for keeping you hacking on Emacs, it is a good
trade-off. But let's not pretend that all that extra complexity has no
impact on others.