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List:       mozilla-general
Subject:    Re: To give you an idea of QtScape code...
From:       robert havoc pennington <hp () pobox ! com>
Date:       1998-04-12 17:54:04
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konold@alpha.tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de (Martin Konold) writes:
> 
> In order to get a high quality Mozilla a very reliable, mature and well
> maintained and stable (binary compatible) toolkit is necessary IMHO.
> 

Yes. We already have a reliable, mature, and well maintained Mozilla
toolkit: Motif. It's certainly uglier than Qt, but it is those things
you listed. We even have a free version of that toolkit.

The only reason I see to port to a new toolkit, aside from basically
not-worth-it speed/elegance gains, is to fit in to one of the free
desktop environments with a native look-and-feel that will be familiar
to users of that environment and take advantage of that environment's
features. The Motif version will always exist to fill the "looks the
same on every platform" role for Unix. In terms of ease-of-use, in a
multiplatform environment, it's better to use the Motif one; if the
free desktop is the only platform, a desktop-native version will be
more intuitive and require less learning.

Given that, the choice of new toolkits comes down to the choice of
desktops, and I'd choose Gnome rather than KDE for a variety of
reasons. Others will make a different choice. So, like every single
program these days, there will be one version starting with K and
another starting with G. We should think of these as KDE and Gnome
ports, not Unix ports, since Motif will have that role in the
forseeable future. 

Anyway, that's pretty much what's going to happen, IMHO, no matter
what any of us think about it.

Havoc Pennington
http://pobox.com/~hp

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