Re: gEDA: SPICE GUI

[Bill Cox <bill@viasic.com>]

On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 11:05, Dale E Martin wrote:
> > You're right...  Qt is GPL'd, just like most of our code.  But, in
> > addition, they let commercial companies use it for a fee.  That seems
> > reasonable to me.  In comparison, wxWidgets is basically free for use
> > either in commercial software or GPL'd software.
> 
> I believe the issue with QT is that it is GPLed on Linux, but it's only
> available under a proprietary license for Windows -- other than a fairly
> old version.  See the FAQ for more info:
> http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/faq.html
> 
> So if you don't like the GPL, QT is not a good choice no matter what the
> platform.  If you would like Windows compatibility and you don't want to
> pay for QT, then QT is not a good choice either.
> 
> On the other hand, wxWidgets maps onto GTK which I don't think looks nearly
> as nice as QT.  And QT is supposed to be very very easy to develop with.
> KDE (which uses QT) has a fairly capable IDE environment from what I
> understand.  I don't know anything about wxWidgets in this regard, and last
> time I looked at GTK (a long time ago) I thought that the API was fairly
> ugly.  Hopefully it has improved since then.
> 
> In my mind there is no one solution that's going to work for everyone.
> Just tossing in my $0.02.

So... you've up'ed the bid to US $0.02, which I think is still more than
EU $0.01.

Ok, so Qt is out.  What's the point in using a portable layer if we
can't port it?

I have to agree that the GTK API is not very clean, at least in the GTK
1 version I've been using.  As Bert mentioned, however, there's that
Glade thing, which sounds nice, and there's the fact that a bunch of us
already have a lot of GTK code.

Still, wxWidgets sounds good.  I haven't heard anything negative about
it yet.

If some of us did start using wxWidgets, would we lose the benefits of 
Glade, and the up-and-comming Anjuta IDE?  Are there reasonable
alternatives for wxWidgets?

Thanks,
Bill