Future direction - GRASS GUI

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Fri, Jan 14, 2000 at 01:18:33PM +0100, Pavol Cvengros wrote:
> I am glad someone finally decided to create such a thing as a GUI,
> yet if I could voice my opinion, I would like to opose Bernhard Reiter's
> views on these issues:
>     - python: seems to be a good object-oriented language, but how many
> people can actually program in it?

Well a huge number and rasing constantly. Because it is much easier to
handle as Perl, C++, Tcl, Lisp or Java (the last two ones debatable)
the number of capable programmers is high.
It is even a good choise to learn programming. (Recommended by Eric
Raymond in his Hacker FAQ e.g. ).

Oh and people who use it:
	http://www.python.org/psa/Users.html
	(included: Digital Creations (Zope), Infoseek, eGroups,
	NASA, Red Hat, IBM, MCI Worldcom, HP... )

It is easy to learn. Anybody who know the programming concepts, picks
up python within hours.

>     - C++ : why not? seems very practical for GUI development

Very bloated. Hard to learn. Easy to make mistakes. No real standard
library and lacking stabel implementations. (Even gcc lately fixed
problems with the stl and exception handling.)

>     - Qt : same question: why not? it is a good library to program in,
> can be used for rapid development. It is safe (no overflows and other
> nasty issues). It is portable to many platforms and so are applications
> which rely solely on the library functions and ot system-specific
> libraries.

Qt is not free software.
At least v1 wasn't. V2 is but only for Unix and with a couple of 
problems. The windows version is proprietory. Thus it is not cross
platform.

	http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html	

	The Qt Public License (QPL).  This is a non-copyleft free
software license which is incompatible with the GNU GPL. It also causes
major practical inconvenience, because modified sources can only be
distributed as patches. 

	      We recommend that you use QPL-covered software packages
only when absolutely necessary, and certainly don't use the QPL for
anything that you write. 

	      Since the QPL is incompatible with the GNU GPL, you cannot
take a GPL-covered program and Qt and link them together, no matter how. 

	      However, if you have written a program that uses Qt, and
you want to release your program under the GNU GPL, you can easily do
that. You can resolve the conflict for your program by adding a notice
[..]


>     I rise these questions because since Christmas I was independently
> working (at that time I wasn't in the mailing-list) on a GUI for GRASS
> (I don't like Tcl/Tk ;-)) using Qt 2.0.2 and C++ under Linux.

Well, you are free to work on anything you like.
Somebody who knows the stuff can certainly write good programs
with Qt and C++. But then why not use fortran or forth?  :-)

	Bernhard
-- 
Free Software Projects and Consulting 		         (intevation.net)  
Association for a Free Informational Infrastructure            (ffii.org)
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