[GRASS5] Leaving

[Thierry Laronde]

Hello Bernhard,

On Sat, Nov 22, 2003 at 04:51:02PM +0100, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> 
> > My plan are, too, to resurrect the X Window/Motif interface which is far
> > more challenging, at least for me: I know at the moment strictly nothing
> > about Motif programming and there has been a fair amount of changes
> > since 1991...
> 
> Wow. I wounder a bit why someone would try to do so.

Yes, I'm a freak... But there is an explanation behind this. To
understand a choice, one has to know what the aim is.

I think that the major advantage that people could advertise about
Tcl/Tk is portability. I put it aside since I have more to say about
that below.

Efficiency? Tcl/Tk is interpreted, so no. 

Maintainability-1? When one installs Tcl/Tk and see the dependencies and
amount of time needed simply to compile... On the other side, Motif for
example depends on X and that's all and Motif is a standard ( Motif X11
Toolkit (industry standard GUI (IEEE 1295)).

Maintainability-2? On the coder side. One advantage is to obtain a
result rapidly. Tcl/Tk is good for prototyping or for small applications
when you don't want to spend much more time on designing an interface
than on developing the core routines.
But the time "gained" initially is several times lost if the interface
is complex. These languages are not as good as more raw ones to
"rectify" the "need curve" (to approach as closely as possible a weird
need with small segments of code). Because the learning time has been
smaller, the coders understand less of the internals resulting in code
"not doing" what it was supposed to do.

Maintainability-3? Almost one half of the compiling/running problems
reported are due to the change in Tcl/Tk (8.3 -> 8.4).
The less dependencies you have, the most stability you can achieve.

Last but not least: portability? People have envisaged portability as:
one has a X machine with a Y OS, how can I make the software run on
(X,Y)? But there are revolutions (linked): free OSes and network.

[A discussion with Michael Barton some days ago has been instructive on
this side]
The portability problem is now: one has a X machine and STOP! We can
provide an OS running on X. And that's all. This OS has not to be
installed even on the local storage of the machine (disk) because it can
be launched from a CD (see Knoppix) or even more importantly downloaded
from the network.
If you have a small application, used a couple of minutes every hour,
dual booting is not an option. With a complete work environment like
GRASS, this is not a problem.

The future, for GRASS as for others, is a network of workstation,
accessing SAN and able to be used as a cluster for heavy computing. And
who says network says, too, yes, thin clients. That is X and light
weight (have mercy for the servers!). 
So Xt... but a "leettle" simpler would be best: Gtk, Qt? There
is Motif. So let's go for Motif.

Regards,
-- 
Thierry Laronde (Alceste) <tlaronde at polynum.org>
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89  250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C