Re: Wizard GUI for X

[David Given <dg@...>]

On Wednesday 08 September 2004 06:58, Asko Kauppi wrote:
> I think the idea was to do it in X11 native.  Since he's making an
> installer, the libraries available on the target machine cannot be
> trusted upon.

In that case he's doomed. If you don't want any library dependencies other the 
X itself, you get Xlib (basic drawing primitives), Xt (abstract widget 
toolkit without any actual widgets) and Xaw (very, very primitive and sucky 
widget toolkit built on Xt), and that's it.

Building a user interface on top of Xaw, a.k.a. Athena, is an excercise in 
futility. It may give you some idea as to the high regard that they're 
commonly held in if I tell you that both Gtk and Qt bypass Xaw and Xt 
completely and just use drawing primitives in an X window. I've developed for 
Motif, which is another widget set built on top of Xt, and it's not pleasant.

Athena also looks ghastly. Screenshot here:

http://www.efalk.org/Widgets/Xaw.gif

Yes, the layout management really is as bad as it looks.

I think he's probably just going to have to decide to depend on Gtk or Qt. 
Most Unix platforms these days have both, so it's not really a big deal, and 
the increase in functionality is *huge*.

(BTW, remember that you can statically link these libraries into your binary, 
so you don't have to rely on the target system having them installed.)

-- 
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