Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Benjamin Franksen <[email protected]> · Fri, 1 Sep 2006 00:30:13 +0200

On Thursday 31 August 2006 20:24, Andrew Johnson wrote:
> Since a signficant number of EPICS extensions (ALH, DM2K, EDM, MEDM,
> Probe, StripTool) make use of Motif, I think it's worthwhile
> repeating
>
> this news item from Linux Weekly News here:
> > Fedora Core to drop openmotif [Distributions] Posted Aug 31, 2006
> > 16:13 UTC (Thu) by corbet
> >
> > It's official: Fedora Core 6 will not include the openmotif
> > library, which has a non-free license. The library will be removed
> > prior to the October 2 development freeze. As a result, a number of
> > packages using openmotif (including cmucl, ddd, nedit, and xpdf)
> > will break; they, too, will be removed if they cannot be shifted
> > over to lesstif in the next month.
>
> Full Story at http://lwn.net/Articles/197744/
>
>
> This won't prevent OpenMotif from being installed on FC6 machines,
> but it will involve extra work.  FC6 will include LesTif, but that's
> not 100% compatible with the original, and I know we had problems
> with it before OpenMotif came out.

I would not recommend using LessTif for anything that should work 
reliably and emphatically not as a replacement in EPICS applications 
that are based on (Open)Motif.

One example: my favourite text editor 'NEdit', an otherwise extremely 
stable and actively maintained program, is almost completely unusable 
with LessTif. The developers insist that this is not their fault: 
LessTif simply remains bug ridden, despite several reports, some of 
them _years_ ago. It just seems that LessTif doesn't attract enough 
active developers to really get rid of these problems.

OTOH, I have to warn that switching from Motif to a completely different 
GUI library, such as GTK or Qt (as suggested by Kay), or possibly to 
some portable library such as wxWindows, in practice means a complete 
rewrite, at least of the GUI part of the app. This is a _considerable_ 
effort. New applications are, of course, a different matter, as is the 
case where a rewrite is planned anyway.

Just my 2c.
Ben

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System