Slightly obscurer platforms, and UI Code

[Chunky Kibbles]

Has anyone here tried using loki_setup to install stuff on GPE and/or
Opie? Or anything else similarly obscure? It's still a linux box, but
how would you distinguish between the platforms? - for various reasons,
you'll need to use different binaries for what is, underneath, exactly
the same distribution of linux...

I know that there are other, more-popular mechanisms [ipkg sucks],
on familiar, but this is in the whole spirit of complete platform
independance.


In other news, I've been using wxWindows recently, and I have some
thoughts on it and setup:

1) You can't compile the library to have multiple graphics targets...
wxWindows uses the normal library loader, not dlopen() and friends,
in order to do what it does.
The same binary wouldn't be able to do both ncurses and gtk, with
wx alone.
You could code some kind of logic in [eg "don't bother initialising wx if
DISPLAY isn't set - intialise ncurses instead", and link with ncurses
aswell], but I think we'd rather see this done properly using a tooklit
that does that work for us?

2) It doesn't have a curses-style interface...
I can think of a couple incredibly hacky solutions to that, that would
still involve wxWindows as the coding layer, but... let's just not. If
you want a gui-in-the-console, wx doesn't have that in a manner that
we'd appreciate.

3) On the plus side, it's trivially simple to code [especially for the
widgetry that we use in setup], gives you free MacOS support [both 9 and
X], free win32s support, and bonus use-motif-on-unices-where-we-use-motif,
if you want [it can also run with GTK on the same systems].


Basically, as I see it, a combination of wxWindows-and-the-current-ncurses
would be OK and give us free OSX & Windows compatability in addition to
what we already have - but isn't avoiding the problem of having to build
against multiple different GUI libraries for each platform, or having
program logic to acheive the same thing.


Just some thoughts,
Gary (-;