Re: Motif support

[Po Lu]

Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> writes:

> Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> writes:
>
>> The hacker must track those conditionals while reading the source.
>
> Which takes very little effort.
>
>> Somehow we must ensure that the existing and future hackers should know
>> about this ;-)
>
> If you are right and nobody cares about Motif, then they won't bother to
> keep the Motif port building either.
>
>> What I've read from you about motif on this thread convinced me to give
>> it a try, but let's face it, the display code is rotten spaghetti (much
>> of Emacs' C sources are rotten spaghetti, but the display part is far
>> worse) and removing some of the umpteen backends would be a start to
>> improve things.
>
> Removing tiny pieces of code, most of which are tucked away in lwlib/,
> will not improve the "rotten spaghetti" that is the display code (which
> is already a statement I disagree with.)
>
>> If Motif is so good, maybe remove Lucid?
>
> "Lucid" is just the widget library used to interface with (partially)
> both Motif and the variants of Athena widgets.
>
> Both the Motif build and the "Lucid" build use the Lucid library.  Even
> the GTK build, PGTK port, NS port and W32 port use parts of the Lucid
> library for handling menus.  The only GUI port that is completely free
> of lwlib is the Haiku port.

In short: you (and many other people who have not worked with the X
port) are grossly overstating the amount of work needed to keep the
Motif build working, and how difficult it is to comprehend.

New hackers will likely have much more trouble understanding the GTK
code than the code for a well-behaved X toolkit such as Motif.  IME,
they will also have more difficulties understanding X in general, which
is quite different from other contemporary window systems.

For example, do you really understand what we do in `XTflash' with the
various versions of GTK and Cairo?

I apologize in advance if this reply appears to have an accausatory
tone: if it does, I didn't intend for it to be that way, but I couldn't
find another wording that would get the point accross.

Thanks.