Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Ernest L. Williams Jr." <[email protected]> · Thu, 31 Aug 2006 19:04:37 -0400

On Fri, 2006-09-01 at 00:30 +0200, Benjamin Franksen wrote:
> 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.

The EPICS EXTENSIONS have lasted a very long time and we all enjoy them.

So, what is next?  Yes, maybe a re-write is in order for the future
longevity and maintainability. :)

The activity from the Control Systems Studio team has gotten a start
down the path.

> 
> Just my 2c.
> Ben

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System