[Xastir-dev] UI Change?

[Curt, WE7U]

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005, Dalen Kruse wrote:

> I just subscribed to the mailing lists and I'm just starting to play
> with Xastir and packet radio in general.  I'm very impressed so far with
> this program.  I have a question and I tried searching the list
> archives, but the web search is broken at the moment.  Has there been
> any discussion about changing the user interface on Xastir to use a more
> modern toolkit like GTK+ or Qt??  I'm really not trying to stir up any
> UI toolkit holy wars here.  I'm just curious if it's been discussed or
> if it is technically feasible.  Thanks.

It would be a lot of work, for little net gain.  If we had the
option to compile with Qt we could run on some smaller embedded
Linux devices, like the Sharp Zaurus, so that'd be a net gain.  The
amount of work required to get there would be tremendous, plus we'd
then have to pay a licensing fee to Trolltech to use this on some
platforms (like Windows and perhaps some embedded devices).

This would also add another library dependency for Unix/Linux
platforms, although it would replace dependencies on Motif and/or
X11.  X11 & Motif are more universal in the Unix world.

There may be some X11-specific things we're doing now that aren't
possible or would have to be entirely re-coded if we switch widget
sets as well.  X11 Regions are one such possibility.

WxWidgets and Gtk are other possibilities.

If/when we get to the Xastir-2 planning/design stage, some of these
things might be possible.  Right now a conversion would take a very
stable app that runs on a variety of platforms and turn it into a
very buggy app (for quite a while) that runs on fewer installed
platforms, which also may require licensing fees.

Xastir-2 has been thought of as being a client-server model, where
the servers are daemons, and the clients can have multiple versions
coded for various platforms and using various widget sets.  Each
client would most likely be a subset of the functionality that we
have now, so you'd have a messaging client, a mapping client, etc,
and could run multiple copies of each and/or run on multiple systems
at once, making a nice distributed Xastir system.

--
Curt, WE7U.   APRS Client Comparisons: http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
"Lotto:    A tax on people who are bad at math." -- unknown
"Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates." -- WE7U
"The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"