[lsb-discuss] Motif and LSB

[Dallman, John]

Ian Murdock [mailto:imurdock at imurdock.com] wrote: 

> One question to answer there is whether Motif ships in 
> the major distros. I was under the impression that just 
> about all the distributions have been removing it, but I
> could be wrong.
> ... a question for the ISV is how they deal with this. 

I guess I'm the ISV in question. 

The distros we take an interest in at present are SUSE 
Enterprise and Red Hat Enterprise. Both ship it; SUSES 
install it by default, and Red Hat don't. We tell the 
customers to install it, and they are, so far, willing 
to do so. 

One should note that this is fairly expensive software,
in a market segment where the usual reason for adopting 
Linux seems to be superior price-performance over 
commercial UNIX, while retaining UNIX-style usage and 
sysadmin. 

> I'm assuming they'd either statically link or bundle 
> the shared object.

We have not done this so far. We would naturally prefer 
that Motif was standardised. Bundling Motif would be a 
whole lot less work than re-writing the user interface. 
Qt would be more interesting to us than Gtk, because 
Qt also runs on Mac OS X without X-Windows. 

> Of course, the larger issue is how prevalent this will 
> be as we go out and talk to ISVs, particularly those 
> coming from the Unix world. If the use of Motif is still 
> widespread, and ISVs generally have no interest in moving 
> to Gtk and Qt (as Adobe, Real, and others> we are working 
> with have done)

Use of Motif is widespread for UNIX ISVs. ISVs who are selling 
software that one might describe as "industrial" rather than 
"consumer" tend not be looking to redesign user interfaces 
frequently. 

I think our user interface folks would see recoding the 
user interface for Qt as "overhead" work rather than 
"sales-creating" work. Our customers tend to be functionality-
orientated; when I talk to Apple, I find it hard to get 
over to them just how much the "Oooh! Cool!" factor doesn't 
apply. This is largely because CAD software is never used 
by "business decision-makers" (aka pointy-haired types). 

-- 
John Dallman, Parasolid Porting Engineer, +44-1223-371554 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ian Murdock [mailto:imurdock at imurdock.com]
> Sent: 16 November 2006 17:04
> To: Wichmann, Mats D
> Cc: Dallman, John; lsb-discuss
> Subject: Motif and LSB
> 
> 
> (Old thread, new subject, catching up on email still :-)
> 
> So, Mats is correct in that there's really not much we can do
> for this ISV *today* given the fact that the LSB doesn't include
> Motif and that the existing Motif library isn't LSB compliant.
> 
> There's a couple of things we could do to make the LSB more relevant
> to this ISV though. One is that we could add Motif to the LSB,
> perhaps even to LSB 3.2. One question to answer there is whether
> Motif ships in the major distros. I was under the impression that
> just about all the distributions have been removing it, but I
> could be wrong. If this is indeed true, then Motif isn't an LSB
> candidate, because we only standardize things that are best
> practice in the Linux world as defined by what the distros ship.
> 
> If it is indeed the case that Motif isn't shipping in the 
> distros anymore,
> a question for the ISV is how they deal with this. I'm assuming they'd
> either statically link or bundle the shared object. In this case, the
> key would be to get the Motif library LSB compliant, so they can
> bundle it and still be considered LSB compliant. We can either
> do this by working with the provider of the library (is it still
> the Open Group?) to make it compliant, or we could
> change the LSB to make it compliant, if that's appropriate here.
> 
> [Note: I'm now seeing Alan's comments about static linking.. Makes
> sense and looks like bundling the shared object is the best way to
> go here.]
> 
> Of course, the larger issue is how prevalent this will be as we go
> out and talk to ISVs, particularly those coming from the Unix world.
> If the use of Motif is still widespread, and ISVs generally have no
> interest in moving to Gtk and Qt (as Adobe, Real, and others
> we are working with have done), then we need to find a good solution
> for the Motif issue. Naturally, we'll have to weigh this
> with the other urgent matters that we're currently dealing 
> with too. :-)
> 
> Any thoughts on what to do here?
> 
> -ian
> -- 
> Ian Murdock
> 317-863-2590
> http://ianmurdock.com/
> 
> "Don't look back--something might be gaining on you." --Satchel Paige
>