Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!apple!bloom-beacon!DECUS.BITNET!PSCOTT
From: PSCOTT@DECUS.BITNET ("Peter Scott, NASA/JPL")
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: X Toolkit portability
Message-ID: <8905091758.AA20302@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
Date: 9 May 89 14:33:00 GMT
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 36

One of the main justifications I am required to provide for the powers-that-be
for our investment in X is that programs written using it are completely
portable, or, at least, if they are not, the non-portable code will not be
part of the X code.

<FLAME ON>

When I first joined this group, I posted a note saying, essentially, "I've read
that the X protocol and Xlib are standards, but nothing about the toolkit being
a standard.  Should I write my programs in Xlib only to ensure portability?"
And the replies came back, "No, no, use the toolkit, it's part of the standard,
everyone has it".

Just went to a seminar on X-Windows here at DECUS and found out that the toolkit
is *not* part of any standard, that standardization efforts are being made, but
that they will standardize on either Motif, XUI, or something from Unix
International, *not* the Athena widgets.  Furthermore, attempting to port the
MIT toolkit to X implementations that don't have it (for instance, DEC
workstations, of which we have a lot and are getting more) is likely to be
fraught with difficulties in areas such as file system access.

Code is not portable if you have to take a huge amount of source code from the
libraries that it calls and port *that* to your target system.  Some people who
are not being paid to produce results might not consider that a problem.  Now I
have to recode the Sun-Vaxstation portability demo I was working on using Xlib
calls only.  I understand that standardizing the protocol and Xlib first was
great for vendors, but it is a pain for application programmers (and even worse
for users, who still don't have consistent look-and-feel) when they don't have
a standard to program by.

<FLAME OFF>  (Flame not directed at any individuals personally)

Peter Scott (pjs@grouch.jpl.nasa.gov)

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