Re: gEDA: GUI toolkits (was: SPICE GUI)

[Ales Hvezda <ahvezda@moria.seul.org>]

[snip]
>My £0.02: I made a big mistake last year doing a front-end in GTK 1. 
>It's now unsupported, and I'm going to have to do a lot of work to get 
>up to GTK 2. This would never have happened with commercial software, or 

How far did you get with your port to gtk+ 2.x?  Which gtk+ 1.x widgets
does your app use?

I have successfully ported gEDA/gaf from the early days of gtk+ 0.99, to
1.0, 1.2, 2.0, 2.2, and now finally to 2.4 with fairly minimal pain (much
to my pleasure).  I have found that most of the changes were cosmetic
or just a matter of figuring out the few changes between versions.
Going from 2.2 to 2.4 required zero changes.

Things get unsupported in all the time (in both free software and
commercial software).  Just look at some of Microsoft's APIs: MFC, COM,
DCOM, COM+, ATL, VB6, GDI, etc...  I can pretty much guarantee that if
you submitted a real MFC bug to Microsoft, they would *not* fix it.
Unsupported/deprecated libraries/APIs are a reality of all software,
otherwise there would be little forward progress.

Regardless of this, gtk+ 1.2.x is still available (including the source)
and will be for a long time, so your app can continue to live.

--

Every GUI toolkit has its advantages, disadvantages, quirks, and
tradeoffs.  You have to play with each and make up your own mind.

  * If you want to use C to write GUIs, then gtk+ is a fine choice.
  * If you want to use C++ to write GUIs, then wxWidgets is a fine choice.
  * If you want to use C++ to write GUIs, then gtkmm is a fine choice.
  * If you want to use C++ to write GUIs, then fltk and fox are fine choices.
  ...

Okay, I'm finished and this thread should be too. :-)

						-Ales