Re: GNUstep Window Manager (was RE: Idea)

[Helge Hess]

Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
> > Maybe, but the discussion doesn't go about what I use !, but about the
> > usefulness of developing YAXT (yet another X11 toolkit) and about the
> > focus of GNUstep as a project.
> 
> I'm sure you know this - but it's perhaps worth noting for the sake of those 
> who
> don't, that gstep-gui is not designed to be an X11 toolkit (which is what 
> xgps and
> xdps are), but to be a cross-platform toolkit able to efficiently work with a
> variety of relatively simple backend toolkits.

I can only note to this that any of the toolkits I mentioned already
*are* X-platform. Qt, gtk+, wxWindows, Tk all *are* cross-platform (at
least to Win* and partly even to MacOS) even thought you might consider
them 'X' toolkits. You say GNUstep-gui isn't an X-toolkit, but doesn't
provide a single backend which isn't X based - something is wrong here.
Qt even extends to Palm devices (really amazing !), I've recently seen a
gtk+ which runs on on the framebuffer device, ...

If the backend architecture is *the* technical advantage, this is to be
proved by implementations.
Some future thoughts of me (;-): this is exactly the reason why all
widget/UI handling should be separated from the application itself and
put into a separate 'widget-server'.

> Certainly the API is totally un-X-like, which is perhaps a reason why we have 
> few
> developers (and a reason why we have those of us that wqe do have).

No, I don't think that this is the reason at all. Eg you also have to
learn the gtk+ object system to be able to develop in gtk+. I don't
think gtk+ or Qt are in any way 'X'-like.
For me the reason is that there was no usable GS GUI yet. Before Qt and
gtk+ started with a fully working framework, not with a thing in
development. gs-gui isn't even in this start stage.

Killer: If GNUstep manages to create a really good text framework, this
could be the breakthrough. I consider that incredible difficult, but if
it is done, it would be killer.

Greetings
  Helge