Re: Motif support

[Óscar Fuentes]

Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> writes:

> Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> writes:
>
>> I looked at the sources and quickly decided that I would only work with
>> that under duress.
>
> That applies to any large code one is not used to working with, be it
> based on GTK or Motif.

I disagree. I worked on some code bases much larger than Emacs' C part,
with an application domain much more technical and specialized, and
achieved productivity on non-trivial tasks after a few hours of study.
Those are projects that put a lot of thought on code architecture, both
macro and micro, with no tolerance for long-lived hacks or "somehow this
seems to work" changes.

Emacs does not fit that description at all. And please do not take this
as a criticism towards the contributors, I have much respect for their
work seeing how stable Emacs is.

>> New hackers probably are more comfortable with GTK than with legacy X
>> libraries.
>
> Please take a look at `XTflash' and decide whether or not you are
> comfortable with the GTK code: it is representative of the many hoops we
> go through in order to work with GTK.  Ditto for the pgtk port, which I
> found to somehow not be much better in this aspect.

Well, we always can pick a counter-example where GTK simplifies the job,
can't we? What XTflash does is somewhat weird, but for other more
mundane tasks GTK can be better. Or so I'll guess, since I don't know
that library and I've heard lots of times that it is a bit difficult to
work with in comparison with other contemporary toolkits.