Motif (getting nedit to work with lesstif)

[Carlo Graziani]

This is a fascinating thread, and somewhat hopeful to someone who would
grieve for Nedit, were the project to bitrot away into oblivion.

I have a perhaps naive observation.  In part, these difficulties appear to
arise from the requirement that there should be _some_ working motif-like
libraries available where Nedit is to be installed.  The
licensing/stability issues that attend *tif libraries make this a chancy
proposition.

Would it be out of the question to import the required parts of a
Nedit-friendly release of lesstif into the Nedit source, built as, say, a
smallish library ("neditif")?  Presumably this would be accomplished by
extracting lesstif code that is called directly from Nedit, plus anything
downstream from those functions.

I am assuming Nedit does not use more than a fraction of Motif
functionality, although I don't actually know this.  If this were true,
then this approach would have the advantage that the Nedit team would only
have to curate the aspects of Motif functionality that concern the
application, which is presumably easier than spelunking for bugs in the
full lesstif distribution.

It would be sort of like forcing a fork of lesstif, and nobody likes
forking.  But sometimes forks are necessary.  While I do not assume that
this would necessarily be an easy task to accomplish.  I am suggesting that
it would have an attractive feature:  once the one-time lifting of the
required functionality into neditif has been accomplished, Nedit could get
a divorce from Motif library development and licensing politics, and its
fate could be disentangled from Motif's.

Anyway, there's a suggestion, for what it's worth.  Thanks for Nedit, I use
it every day.

Cheers,

Carlo

-- 
Carlo Graziani                                 (773) 702-7973 (Voice)
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics       (773) 702-6645 (FAX)
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