[Xastir] Getting rid of external libraries (opinion)

[Dick Repasky]

Somehow, I missed the original. See inserts below.

Dick

Curt, WE7U wrote:

>>
>> 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.
>>

If the stability problem is buggy libraries, switching libraries without
necessarily internalizing them seems to be good enough. If the stability problem
is rapidly changing libraries that are not well documented or libraries with so
many incompatible versions that it's difficult to compile for more than one
distro, I'm all for internalizing to save headaches.

>>
>> 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.
>>

Sounds like buggy libraries.

>> 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.
>>

I realize that it is a huge task, but I think that switching the GUI is
inevitable.  If only one GUI will be supported, my vote is for a GUI that can
also be  built on Windows with as little modification as possible.  As much as I
like Linux, I realize that most computer users and most hams are Windows users.
A fellow ham at work has convinced me that the state of APRS on Windows is
deteriorating as UI-View slides into history and that the loss of APRS on
Windows affects all of APRS.




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