Motif

[Thomas Orgis]

Am Sat, 28 Feb 2009 21:08:52 +0100
schrieb Joerg Fischer <jf505 at gmx.de>: 

> Unless the OpenGroup releases Motif as free software, I'd say no

Agreed.

> > Should I ditch the non-really-free OpenMotif and switch to lesstif 0.95?
> 
> Unfortunately, the latest lesstif versions contain more glitches than some
> older ones wrt nedit. 
> 
> Starting with 94.4 there is even more than just a glitch in there. The key 
> sequence Alt+H ESC lets nedit crash. But if someone can fix lesstif, IMO 
> it's more worthwhile than doing customization to get OM running.

Interesting. Say, what would be the best lesstif version that's stable?
Hm. Also, I'd suspect nedit being a rather major application for lesstif (what else in the free software world uses Motif?) ... so it is rather disturbing to hear of new versions being even more troublesome, combined with the apparent lack of activity to fix the issues (or any activity at all).
Anyhow, fixing lesstif issues would make more sense than fixing openmotif... though, there is again this itch to somehow rewrite nedit to have my very own best editor in the world;-) 

> > That aside, people generally respond with suprise and incomprehension when I talk about > needing that strange proprietary UNIX toolkit, 
> 
> Just compare the start-up times of nedit, kedit/kate, and gedit, then tell me 
> what is strange. 

...that I cannot scroll fluently in a (larger) text file with a CPU that can run Doom 2;-)
Honestly, I used kate before and I wasn't able to bear the lagging anymore.
That's the danger of the wish for nedit to get updated with needed features... you could end up with something that is just like the others:-(
I really hope it can be different.

> > it would be nice if we could at least get a new release of nedit with various fixes
> > improvements that are in CVS?
> 
> You claim to be a source distribution and you can't do a check-out of
> nedit's sources? ;-)

shell$ nedit -version
5.6 [Under Development] HEAD
Jan 21, 2009

     Built on: Linux, x86-64, GNU C
     Built at: Jan 21 2009, 13:43:05
   With Motif: (Untested) 2.3.1 [@(#)Motif Version 2.3.1]


Issue is that we at Source Mage have a rather strict policy to default to the stable upstream releases.
We offer development versions for some software packages as an option, only resorting to something like CVS snapshots if there really is no alternative.
I see the official release as a sign of life from nedit. So far, people think it's dead since 4 years.
Well, as current maintainer of mpg123, I can say from experience that it can take some time to convince people that a project is _not_ dead anymore, having been dormant for ... hm... hard to say, about 5 years.
Well, one should try to make a release from time to time, even if it's just a "Ping";-)

I think I'm gonna try what happens with lesstif 0.95 ... at least that predictable crash should be able to trace...?
But then, it doesn't feel ecomomic having to fixup a large toolkit for exactly one application on my system needing it.


Alrighty then,

Thomas.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.nedit.org/pipermail/discuss/attachments/20090228/e0ad0c44/signature.bin