Motif 1.2.x & X11R5

[David Gerdes]

In defense of CERL, and those who made the decision to embrace Motif,
we had to make a decision to enter the X world.  In the past we had
looked at other more freely available packages like TAE, but nothing
at the time was available that was well supported, and had strong enough
support to ensure its survival.  If we picked a system that was not widely
available or was not going to continue to be supported, we would
be working ourselves into a corner.  Athena widgets was not distributed
with all systems, and the X Consortium was talking about dropping
any future support for it.  If we had selected Athena, there would
have been an outcry from all the people who don't have it on their machines,
"Why didn't you select a standard like Motif?!"

Motif was the one standard that was almost universally available and
had considerable support behind it.  We struggled internally here
about using Motif, but finally accepted that for the majority of users
it would be available with their operating system, or at least
available for a moderate price.  Personally, I think it was a very good
choice. They have made the product available for small or no cost
to the majority of people.

I cannot confirm or deny this, but the rumors I have been hearing
is that Motif will/does require runtime licenses.



Note, we are currently looking at using Tcl/Tk for some new development
in GRASS.  I am not making any promises here because there have been no
decisions made.  But I am currently looking at using Tcl for a variety
of things in GRASS, and there are several people at CERL planning on
using Tcl/Tk as a replacement for XGEN in their reimbursable projects.

Rewriting Xmenu and Xclip in Tcl has been breifly mentioned, but there are
much more pressing issues being dealt with currently, like DBMS interface,
new vector data structures, and floating point.  If anyone would like to
volunteer to port XGRASS to Tcl, I am sure it would be greatly appreciated.

I am also looking at using Tk canvases (integrated with the Xgdisplay
library) as a foundation for the next GRASS display widget.  That too
depends on sponsor priorities.

Some of the above is hearsay, and thus I may not have all the facts correct.

All of the above are my own opinions and do not necessarily represent
those of CERL.
-- 
  David Gerdes
  US Army Construction Engineering Research Lab
  Spatial Analysis & Systems Team
  dpgerdes at zorro.cecer.army.mil