It was suggested that I number the points so that people could comment on them individually. I changed the '*' chars to numbers below and corrected one typo ("Qt" instead of "Qtu").
On Fri, 8 Aug 2008, Curt, WE7U wrote:
We've been suffering from problems with IM (somewhat more), GM (somewhat less), Motif, and Lesstif for some time, with a few problems here and there with wget and libcurl. Sometimes a few other libs but probably not enough to worry about. When I think about external libs now I mostly think of problems instead of solutions. I've been interested for some time in dumping some of our libraries and finding alternatives, but not interested enough yet to actually start doing it. 1) IM/GM might be replaced for our purposes with some package that could do GIF/JPG/PNG, was in source form, and was GPL'ed. We could add it to our package like we did the Shapelib package. Tom will probably break in here and suggest that we not add things to our sources like this, but really we've had so much trouble with IM/GM that I'm suggesting that replacing them with a known working subset is a good thing. It'd solve a major problem that we have had for years: Unstable image libraries. There's quite a bit of image processing code in Xastir so this would take a while to do. 2) I've had some trouble with non-working wget in the past, and very occasionally with libcurl. Our code is already isolated pretty well here so that we could find a package that did ftp/http fetches and integrate it into our code easily. That would solve another problem and would be easy/fast to do. 3) The last problem is the OpenMotif/Lesstif thing. These libraries are rapidly aging now, everyone else having moved on to the Qt and/or Gtk+ libraries. Switching our GUI over to one (or both?) of these would be a more major task, as there's GUI code through most of our source files. If we added image processing and ftp/http fetching code to our sources, every compile would be capable from then on of working with internet maps and local raster or vector (Shapelib) images. If we then went the extra step of getting rid of Motif, we'd potentially be able to compile on more platforms, with a lot of work, and would bypass some of the widget problems we have fairly often now.
-- Curt, WE7U. archer at eskimo dot com http://www.eskimo.com/~archer Lotto: A tax on people who are bad at math. - unknown Windows: Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates. - WE7U. The world DOES revolve around me: I picked the coordinate system!" _______________________________________________ Xastir mailing list Xastir@xastir.org http://lists.xastir.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xastir