[lsb-discuss] Motif and LSB

Robert Schweikert robert.schweikert at abaqus.com
Thu Nov 16 10:30:58 PST 2006


On Thu, 2006-11-16 at 17:35 +0000, Dallman, John wrote:
> 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'd like to chime in on this one, just to provide a data point. We
dumped Motif years ago based on the following reasoning. We needed to
support Unix, Linux and M$ and we were not going to maintain two sets of
GUI code. Thus a toolkit which abstracts at a low level was needed since
emulation through Exceed or other products did not provide the
performance or quality we were looking for. 

Thus I think re-writing (dumping Motif) is a "value add" proposition.
Simply by saving money in development, if M$ support is required.

Most of our GUI conversion was scripted and then the domain experts did
a clean up pass. The transition was fairly quick and reasonably
painless. Our customers on all platforms were happy with the result.

> 
> 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
> > 
> 
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-- 
Robert Schweikert                   MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU
(Robert.Schweikert at abaqus.com)                 LINUX
ABAQUS Inc.
Phone : 401-276-7190
FAX : 401-276-4408





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