[9840] in The GTK GIMP ToolKit mailing list archive
[gtk-list] Re: To GTK, or not to GTK - that is the question
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ulric Eriksson)
Wed Nov 4 10:58:19 1998
Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 16:57:41 +0100 (CET)
From: Ulric Eriksson <ulric@edu.stockholm.se>
To: gtk-list@redhat.com
In-Reply-To: <199811041023.LAA16559@tcs18.nada.kth.se>
Resent-From: gtk-list@redhat.com
Reply-To: gtk-list@redhat.com
On Wed, 4 Nov 1998, Johannes Keukelaar wrote:
> Chris wrote something that boils down to (excuse my snipping):
>
> //Why would I want use GTK instead of Motif? Why is everyone falling over
> //themselves to use GTK when we used to have Motif as the standard?
>
> Do s/GTK/Linux/ s/Motif/Windows/ and you get:
>
> Why would I want to use Linux instead of Windows? Why is everyone falling over
> themselves to use Linux when we used to have Windows as the standard?
IMHO, the interesting question is: "If I don't want to use Motif, why
should I invent yet another widget set". And if the answer to that
question is that no alternatives exist, the next question is "If I'm going
to write a new widget set, why should I invent yet another object
framework".
People aren't falling over themselves to use Linux because it gratuitously
breaks existing standards. On the contrary, here is a quote from the
infamous "Linux is obsolete" war:
---
Torvalds:
The fact is that linux is more portable than minix. What? I hear you
say. It's true - but not in the sense that ast means: I made linux as
conformant to standards as I knew how (without having any POSIX standard
in front of me). Porting things to linux is generally /much/ easier
than porting them to minix.
---
And Tanenbaum's reply:
MINIX was designed before POSIX, and is now being (slowly) POSIXized as
everyone who follows this newsgroup knows. Everyone agrees that user-level
standards are a good idea. As an aside, I congratulate you for being able
to write a POSIX-conformant system without having the POSIX standard in front
of you. I find it difficult enough after studying the standard at great length.
---
The lack of a decent Motif replacement for Linux makes porting to Linux
harder than porting to other Unixes, because like it or not, Motif is the
standard. And basing Gtk on a proprietary framework makes porting any Xt
based application harder than necessary, because like it or not, Xt is the
standard.
Ulric
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