From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Mar 16 03:37:26 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id DAA27530 for hackers-outgoing; Sat, 16 Mar 1996 03:37:26 -0800 (PST) Received: from time.cdrom.com (time.cdrom.com [204.216.27.226]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id DAA27524 for ; Sat, 16 Mar 1996 03:37:24 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by time.cdrom.com (8.6.12/8.6.9) with SMTP id DAA22588; Sat, 16 Mar 1996 03:36:46 -0800 To: Jake Hamby cc: Christoph Kukulies , Sean Kelly , narvi@haldjas.folklore.ee, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Win32 (was:Re: Go SCSI! Big improvement...) In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 26 Feb 1996 16:58:46 PST." Date: Sat, 16 Mar 1996 03:36:44 -0800 Message-ID: <22584.826976204@time.cdrom.com> From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > I agree 100%!! Once I started using Win32/MFC/VC++ I really started to > feel disappointed in the traditional Unix programming tools, including > Motif. Typically you spend 10 times as much money under Sun (for tools I don't think that anyone will disagree with you that the power of MFC, VB or even things like PowerBuilder are totally absent from the traditional UNIX environment. Remember - I've worked for people like Lotus and DEC and I know the issues involved when people want to port a Windows application to UNIX. You, as the UNIX person, generally get to have lots of conversations with the Windows development group that go like this: "You don't have foo? Uh, ok, what about bar? No BAR? How about a BAZ toolkit? What?? NO BAZ TOOLKIT?!? How the &*%$*@! do you guys write apps? Oh.. You don't? Huh! That explains a lot, actually.." The best development environment I ever found for doing "Motif" style apps was OI, but of course they killed that instantly. Some day I'll find out that OpenWare is really owned by Microsoft through a cut-out.. :-) However, let's not get carried away. That is to say: > Basically, my plan is to take the FreeBSD utilities, port them to Win32 > with full GUI interfaces (I mentioned the details in another post), then > eventually be able to "back-port" them to FreeBSD, probably using TWIN. Bleah. I don't think that's going to fly given that the TWIN development environment is _not free_. We're helping them to port it just so the option is there for those that need it, but we won't be able to use it ourselves. To continue: > If not, then at least the core functionality will be wrapped into C++ > classes, so some other enterprising person could write their own user > interface (whether Motif, Tcl/Tk, or whatever) around it. Basically, by Unless that enterprising person is you, I see this all as a monumentally wasted effort. Sure, I can hack all manner of clever utilities out (and was even able to use my beloved OI for the job during a very short period of time there) but if I can't share them with the rest of the community, they're truly useless and I should be spending my time and energy working on more universal tools, even if all they do is use ncurses to scribble on the screen. That's why I didn't release any of my OI-using utilities like adduser (which I did for fun) - they wouldn't have done anyone else any good. Please keep this in mind as you implement whatever system it is you have in mind. I don't think that Win32 is a bad API, necessarily, and it's not impossible to implement a version of MFC that speaks Motif or something else since that's exactly what Bristol Technologies has done (http://www.bristol.com:80/Products/windu.html). You just need to provide *both* sides of the equation before it's going to be useful to anyone. Jordan