LessTif and XGRASS (was: Problems starting GRASS for Linux)

[Justin Hickey]

Hi Thomas

On Jun 13,  3:56pm, Howard Thomas, II Foster wrote:
> And while I'm talking to you.... I just installed GRASS on a Linux box also.
> I was wondering about using XGrass but it requires Motif libraries.  Do you
> know if XGrass will run with the LessTif libraries?

This depends on which version of Motif your version of LessTif is based on.
XGRASS will not compile with Motif 2.0 or above because it contains code which
is no longer supported by Motif. I was in touch with the OSF people about this
and their suggestions was as follows:

> The software is in error. It should not be using these functions. The best
> solution is to write to the person maintaining the software so that you can
> get a copy of the software which uses portable functions.
>
> As a temporary workaround, you can take advantage of the fact that these
> functions probably still exist (these two above definitely do), so you
> can copy the function signatures from the 1.2 XmP.h into a GRASS header
> file that is included by the modules using the functions, then recompile
> on Motif 2.0. Of course, I can't guarantee that this gets you any further
> than a clean compilation.

I posted my concerns to the grass lists that XGRASS will eventually no longer
compile on any platform once people upgrade to new versions of Motif. However,
I got very little response, so it seems that no one is willing (or has the time
- including myself) to dig into the XGRASS code and re-write it appropriately.
So much for OSF's first solution.

Their workaround solution is talking about using function declarations (for
functions starting with _Xm like _XmManagerEnter) in a header file from an
earlier version of Motif (1.2 -  which we have on our SGI machines). Copying
these declarations from XmP.h (version 1.2) to a common header file in XGRASS
(say gis.h), should at least get a clean compile as stated above. Before I
could test this workaround, priorities changed for my work so I still don't
know if this will work (we already had XGRASS working on our SGI's anyway).

I don't know if this helps much, but its the story as far as I know it. Feel
free to contact me directly if you have any other questions.

-- 
Sincerely,

Jazzman (a.k.a. Justin Hickey)  e-mail: jhickey at hpcc.nectec.or.th
High Performance Computing Center
National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC)
Bangkok, Thailand
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