At 9:52 pm -0800 30/10/02, Guy Harris wrote:
>On Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 06:35:32AM +0100, ewitness - Ben Fowler wrote:
>> >...the only two GUIs for which there's support in the current CVS tree are
> > >GTK+ 1.2[.x] and GTK+ 2.x; ...
>[ big snip ]
>
>> or using a framework such as wxWindows which has support for multiple
>> GUIs?
>
>wxWindows has support for *some* GUIs; unfortunately, it doesn't have
>support for a GUI that I think would be of interest to many Ethereal
>users, namely the KDE GUI.
It follows, unless I am misunderstanding, that to get a native
Mac OS X Ethereal off the ground, I might start by putting steam
behind an Ethereal-KDE project. I would be happy to do this.
>A wxWindows GUI might be useful as a way of implementing *some* of the
>GUIs, but it wouldn't be sufficient to provide *all* the GUIs people
>might want. (It also wouldn't be sufficient to provide a text-mode
>curses-based UI; people have expressed interest in that as well.)
Indeed, and I nearly mentioned that a curses based Ethereal (similar
to vim) would suit me.
>If wxWindows doesn't have a widget that does
>that on all the platforms with which we'd want to use it, and doesn't
>allow such a widget to be added for all those platforms, that might
>either render it impossible to use wxWindows or might cause the
>wxWindows version to use significantly more memory and perform some
>operations significantly slower than other versions.
I believe that wxWindows works the way you outlined. It uses native
widgets where they exist and adds 'generic' ones where they do not.
This occasionally causes problems as in the case of the Spin Button
Control (I hope that I have spelled that correctly) which I believe
is native on few platforms. FWIW, wxWindows is popular in some
quarters and unpopular in others.
> >...
> >
>> Would you accept patches intended to create such a product?
>
>Well, I can't speak for all the developers. I'd have no problem with
>patches of that sort, as long as they're not "patches to make Ethereal
>use Aqua as well as GTK+" but "patches to make it possible to have
>Ethereal use several different GUI toolkits, plus patches to make it use
>Aqua in that framework".
I certainly see that. It looks like a process of evolution. If the milestone
is 'Ethereal can use several GUIs' where are the inch-pebbles?
I have mentioned that I would be happy ot work on a KDE gui, and I would
also on a curses one. Would a move to wxWindows be a better starting off
point? Should the directory structure for packet decoders be created
first. An alternative to all this would be to stick with GTK and wait
for that to be ported to other systems, assuming that there remains
work to do on the meat of Ethereal?
Ben.
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