Future of Nedit for people who care about Free Software

[Andrew Hood]

Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've just spent the last 4-5 hours trying to get CVS Nedit to work
> with CVS lesstif.

Don't try tarring NEdit with the same brush as LessTif. Or OpenMotif for
that matter.

It is extremely rare for a CVS version of NEdit to not compile, at least
on the more common platforms (which these days probably means anything
except VMS).

It is rare for a CVS version of NEdit to be broken (i.e. compiles but
crashes) for longer than a couple of hours. Those developers who are
continually being slagged for not releasing a new version are pretty
quick at spotting errors.

Neither of the above are true of either LessTif or OpenMotif.

> Although Nedit works acceptably well with lestif 0.93.94, the 
> current CVS version is horribly broken. There are at least two 
> segfaults that occur deep within libXt due to something that 
> lesstif passes to Xt.
> 
> For me, that means that lesstif is too broken to fix.

Did you bother submitting a bug report to LessTif?

> Another option Openmotif, is not Free Software. Furthermore, on
> 32 bit Ubuntu Gutsy it produced the least stable Nedit I have used 
> in over 12 years. Fixing OpenMotif is a possibility, but I am not 
> going to spend my time fixing software that isn't Free Software.

Did you bother submitting a bug report to Ubuntu? While you might like
their bleeding edge code, you can't expect it to be as stable as a more
conservative distribution.

> The final option is pre-compiled binaries. This option brings me
> right back to 1995 when using precompiled binaries was the only
> way to get Nedit. So for now, I will grit my teeth and use the 
> pre-compiled binaries while I look for an alternative editor.

We have no issues with any of the proprietry Motifs. With the exception
of cygwin, all the rest can legally use OpenMotif. That they choose not
to is their decision. Statically linking a tested verion of OpenMotif's
libXm gives us a stable binary.

If your distribution chooses not to include a static libXm then you
can't build a static binary. One of the developers can choose to build
libXm.a and provide a static NEdit with OpenMotif 2.2.4 or 2.3.0 which
you can then use.

I don't have an AMD box. I do have a EM64T bit Intel box. I can put 64
bit Slackware on that and try a 64 bit NEdit and OpenMotif.

But don't hold your breath.

-- 
There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes.
                -- Dr. Who