[lokisetup] Slightly obscurer platforms, and UI Code

[Chunky Kibbles]

Oh - and another point; it's C++. Take from that whatever you will.

Gary (-;

On Tue, Oct 14, 2003 at 03:42:17PM -0400, Chunky Kibbles wrote:
> 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 (-;