Re: [Texmacs-dev] native and GPL port of QT to win32

[david]

On Tue, Feb 04, 2003 at 10:43:49AM +0100, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> 
> > Just for information, a guy is trying to port the GPL X11 version of QT
> > to win32 :
> > 
> > http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/
> > 
> > It could be nice to use this version for texmacs windows, to avoid
> > licence problems (and fee).
> > 
> > What do(es) the developper(s) think about that ?
> 
> Yes, that is a good idea. Nevertheless, a native Windows port
> for TeXmacs is already being worked on...

Though Qt is good technically, I tend not to trust the licensing
policies of TrollTech very much.

Also I find it risky to base a win32 port, which is *very* important
to the commercial viability of a project on Qt *and* kde-cygwin. If
for some reason the development of kde-cygwin is stalled or Qt decide
to change their licensing policy, we would get into trouble.

Some people are already working on a native port. It seems they
decided to port the xlib subset used by TeXmacs to the native win32
API. Though I do not think that is the best possible solution, and
though I expect merging to be very difficult, I still think that is
currently the best bet.

BTW, Joris, don't you think it would be a good thing to get our hands
on they development code sometimes soon? I am under the impression
that they have diverged a lot from your version (GUI, process, pipe
and file handling at least are very different), so it would probably
be a good thing to start merging while they are still involved.

-- 
David Allouche         | GNU TeXmacs -- Writing is a pleasure
Free software engineer |    http://www.texmacs.org
   http://ddaa.net     |    http://alqua.com/tmresources
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TeXmacs is NOT a LaTeX front-end and is unrelated to emacs.