Re: [Fsfe-uk] Re: An ignorant question?

[Chris Croughton]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 10:13:21AM +0100, Ralph Corderoy wrote:

> The OP who wanted a Visual Basic equivalent but `direct to X' probably
> doesn't realise that X has no concept of push-buttons, scrollbars, etc.
> It provides only a mechanism in many things, not a policy, e.g. how a
> scrollbar should look and work.

Actually, I do -- but my friends who just want to write a simple GUI
front end for something don't necessarily, nor should they need to.
What we need is something with the widgets or whatever built in, and
statically linked into the final app so they don't have to faff around
with whether they have the right version of shared libraries installed
(current Linux/X state of the art reminds me of Win3.1, when every time
you installed a package you had a different and incompatible DLL
version).

For instance, I pulled down the binaries for Squeak/Smalltalk, only to
find that it wanted a different version of glibc.  If it hadn't been
that it would likely have objected to my version of Gtk or whatever it
uses for the GUI.  At which point I think of compiling from source, and
any other users say "sod it, where's the Win98 install disk?".

> These higher level things are typically implemented by widget sets.
> Many make use of the Xt Intrinsics library that, again, doesn't know
> what a scrollbar is but provides a frame in which these things can be
> defined.

I've never even got that far in my X programming, I've only programmed it
"bare metal".

[Description of widget sets snipped -- nice clear summary, incidentally,
I'm saving it elsewhere for reference.]

And I gather they are all incompatible interfaces, yes?  So what I want
is a single GUI which lets me choose which widget set I want to use
(defaulting to whatever) and after that lets me pick from whichever one
I have selected, without having to load up yet another development kit
with yet another user interface -- and to say "take my application and
generate it using Motif (or whatever) so I can see the different style".
Because the casual user who just wants to knock up a simple GUI doesn't
want to have to use XYZ for Athena, QWERTY for Motif/Lesstif, VBNM for
Tk etc., zie just wants to get the job done.

The same goes for other applications.  One thing MS have got right is
that they use VB for scripting in every application which needs
scripting -- Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. as well as "standalone" VB --
so you only have to learn one language.  This theoretically could be
done with (for instance) Java, but it isn't, they all do their own.

Chris C