Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watserv1!sunee!maxwell!gordon
From: gordon@maxwell.waterloo.edu (Gordon R. Strachan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp
Subject: Re: Questions about HPUX 8.0, X11R4, HP policy
Message-ID: <1990Dec18.135719.25336@sunee.waterloo.edu>
Date: 18 Dec 90 13:57:19 GMT
References: <1990Dec13.100152@dali.gatech.edu> <101950173@hpcvlx.cv.hp.com>
Sender: daemon@sunee.waterloo.edu
Organization: University of Waterloo
Lines: 61

In article <101950173@hpcvlx.cv.hp.com> jbb@hpcvlx.cv.hp.com (Jim B. Byers) writes:
>
>OK, now we are getting somewhere.  I understand you to be saying
>the following things.
>
>1)  You are using an HP-UX machine.
>2)  Do not have a support contract because your organization decided
>    not to.
>3)  You have only had access to the net for the past quarter.
>4)  You have need for some X11 based programs that you have seen.
>    Someone on your site compiled them for another machine, but not for
>    HP-UX.

stuff deleted

>Lets cover these.
>
> 
>Re: 6)  I would recommend that you consider ftp-ing the libraries from
>hpcvaaz as Harry describes in his response.  You would prefer that
>these were included in HP-UX.  This is a tough one.  We wrestled with
>this one when the Athena widgets first came out (R2).As you mentioned
>people would expect us to support/bug fix them if they were in HP-UX.
>It frankly has not come up as much of an issue as the libraries are
>available via hpcvaaz and most commercial developers use Motif if they
>are widgeteers.  In short we (here on the X11/Motif/VUE team ) haven't
>heard many complaints. Really.
>
>

Okay, I interpret this to say that unless we complain, we won't get the Athena
widget set shipped in v8.0.  So okay, I'm complaining! I want the Athena
widgets put into the standard HP distribution.

What you say is in essentially correct.  When I write X programs I use the
motif widgets because they are better than the Athena widgets.  But, the
problem comes when you want to compile public domain code, the vast
majority of which still use the Athena widgets.  I don't think it is such a
big deal for HP to stick the library in the distribution and mark it as
unsupported.  After all, wasn't that what the /usr/contrib directory was for,
unsupported contributed software?  At least make it an option for those of us
that want it.  The lack of Athena widgets and totally brain dead man page names
for the Xt library functions are the two biggest problems with HP's X software.

I would like to add though, that on the hole I am quite happy with HP's X
software.  I don't consider HP's additions to the X server to be minor.  The
reason I never installed the R4 stuff from MIT is I didn't want to lose these
additions, most notably the starbase extensions.  Also, I have been satisfied
with HP software support.  It seems to me, although this is just subjective,
that HP has a lot more updates than other major vendors (ie Sun) and their
O/S is more stable.  The software support is expensive but, so far at least, I
think it has been worth the money.

>
>I am glad to have read your comments.  And I hope that this helps!  
>
>Jim Byers
>ITO Marketing/Lab Team


Gordon