[Xastir] Getting rid of external libraries (opinion)

[Curt, WE7U]

It was suggested that I number the points so that people could
comment on them individually.  I changed the '*' chars to numbers
below and corrected one typo ("Qt" instead of "Qtu").


On Fri, 8 Aug 2008, Curt, WE7U wrote:

> We've been suffering from problems with IM (somewhat more), GM
> (somewhat less), Motif, and Lesstif for some time, with a few
> problems here and there with wget and libcurl.  Sometimes a few
> other libs but probably not enough to worry about.
>
> When I think about external libs now I mostly think of problems
> instead of solutions.
>
> I've been interested for some time in dumping some of our libraries
> and finding alternatives, but not interested enough yet to actually
> start doing it.
>
> 1) IM/GM might be replaced for our purposes with some package that
> could do GIF/JPG/PNG, was in source form, and was GPL'ed.  We could
> add it to our package like we did the Shapelib package.
>
> Tom will probably break in here and suggest that we not add things
> to our sources like this, but really we've had so much trouble with
> IM/GM that I'm suggesting that replacing them with a known working
> subset is a good thing.  It'd solve a major problem that we have had
> for years:  Unstable image libraries.  There's quite a bit of image
> processing code in Xastir so this would take a while to do.
>
> 2) I've had some trouble with non-working wget in the past, and very
> occasionally with libcurl.  Our code is already isolated pretty well
> here so that we could find a package that did ftp/http fetches and
> integrate it into our code easily.  That would solve another problem
> and would be easy/fast to do.
>
> 3) The last problem is the OpenMotif/Lesstif thing.  These libraries
> are rapidly aging now, everyone else having moved on to the Qt
> and/or Gtk+ libraries.  Switching our GUI over to one (or both?) of
> these would be a more major task, as there's GUI code through most
> of our source files.
>
> If we added image processing and ftp/http fetching code to our
> sources, every compile would be capable from then on of working with
> internet maps and local raster or vector (Shapelib) images.  If we
> then went the extra step of getting rid of Motif, we'd potentially
> be able to compile on more platforms, with a lot of work, and would
> bypass some of the widget problems we have fairly often now.

-- 
Curt, WE7U.				archer at eskimo dot com
http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
   Lotto:  A tax on people who are bad at math. - unknown
Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates. - WE7U.
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