[Gcl-devel] RE: [Axiom-developer] ntxlib.zip

[Mike Thomas]

Hi all.

Tim wrote:

| Bill, Camm,
|
| It appears that there is a library ntxlib which is a dll that
| translates x11 calls to the windows api. Here is the link:
| http://paramvir_likhari.tripod.com/mcse/unix/unix2nt.htm
|

This library has reared it's head on this forum more than once now - I have
studiously ignored those mentions for personal strategic reasons.  There are
at least three different versions available on the web as far as I know.

At risk of being a wet blanket I can say that this path (which I, Malcolm
Blue, Glynn Clements and others took to build a graphics server for GRASS
several years ago) is not as easy as it sounds.

We tweaked and poked and prodded and added new bits and the server based on
that library worked quite well, up to a point, but the library offered
incomplete Xlib coverage and was a continual source of problems whenever
anyone added something new to the server; that is, there was always more
work to be done.

This path would be profitable if someone knowledgable in both Xlib and Win32
GDI choose to take the library under their wing and run with it as their
personal pet project (as we originally planned), but in reality we all
preferred to work on other stuff and ultimately (in the case of GRASS) I
think it would have been easier to write from scratch a special Win32 API
version of the GRASS graphics server.

And yes, I did try to use the improved version of that library with the GCL
Xlib binding a couple of years ago (and several very simple Xlib C examples)
and gave up for half forgotten reasons - crashes, incomplete semantics and
available functions etc.

For that special someone willing to take on that library, here is the
improved GRASS source tree version:

  http://freegis.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/grass/src/display/devices/windows/

Cheers

Mike Thomas.