Re: [Gnu-arch-users] portable tla gui

[David Allouche]

On Thu, 2004-09-09 at 14:20 -0400, Adrian Irving-Beer wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 09, 2004 at 09:13:16AM +0200, David Allouche wrote:
> 
> > It makes no good to have a tla gui which is more portable than
> > tla itself.
> 
> There is a single situation -- Windows running tla under one of the
> various methods available (Cygwin, etc.) but using a native GUI.

That is a different question then. You look like want to know about a
way of running a tla GUI front-end on Windows.

There three points to consider:

     1. Is tla usable for you on Windows? I do not follow the Windows
        compatibility threads, but it seems like Windows support is
        still quite experimental.
     2. Is there a tla GUI which meet your needs? The two GUIs I know
        for tla are tlator (unmaintained, written in C, based on GTK2)
        and octopy (inactive, written in Python, based on Qt).
     3. Is there a tla GUI which could easily be ported on Windows? You
        might run into license problems with Octopy, because the Win32
        version of Qt is GPL-incompatible. In any case, those programs
        rely heavily on spawning tla processes and processing their
        output from pipe. Spawning processes is notoriously expensive on
        Win32. I heard that pipes were problematic to use on win32, but
        this is not really a requirement for tla, so might be able to
        put something up anyway.

The situation on MacOS X is significantly better since it is much closer
to a proper unix operating system.

> If that's even possible.

That should be possible for a sufficiently motivated programmer,
assuming he is willing to carry on tlator development or is able to get
a licensing exception for Octopy.

The latter seems unlikely, since as a contributor to Octopy I would not
agree to my freely contributed code being relicensed that way.

For some reason, GUI front-ends to tla seem to raise very little
community interest. The community seems to be made mostly of hard-core
unix types, either vim/xterm fans or emacs adepts.

Ho... by the way, xtla (the emacs integration) seems to be doing pretty
well, and emacs is quite portable. But I guess that is not an acceptable
value of GUI :-)

-- 
                                                            -- ddaa