[Xastir-dev] UI Change?

[Dalen Kruse]

On Thu, 2005-02-17 at 08:58 -0800, Curt, WE7U wrote:
> 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!"
> 
> 
Thanks for the reply on this, Curt.  I started looking at the source
code to try to see what things could easily be changed, but I quickly
saw the complexity of the UI code.  The only reason I brought this up
was I noticed some things that seemed to be forced using Motif could
easily be done with some Gtk widgets.  I'll be monitoring this list and
the user list.  Some of the things that you mentioned about version 2
sound very exciting.  Perhaps we can revisit this issue at that time.
I'd be happy to contribute whatever I can to that effort.

-- 
Dalen Kruse <dalen.kruse at blacklion.org>
APRS and Xastir newb.