At 11:32 pm -0800 30/10/02, Guy Harris wrote:
>On Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 07:46:11AM +0100, ewitness - Ben Fowler wrote:
>> 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:
> > >> >...
> > >
>> >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'm not sure that'd be a better way to get a native MacOS X Ethereal
>than just doing an Ethereal-Aqua project, as the KDE port itself
>wouldn't help with Aqua, and the work you'd do to make Ethereal more
>friendly towards KDE (atop which you'd do the KDE port) would probably
>be the same as the work you'd do to make Ethereal more friendly towards
>Aqua - i.e., it'd just be generic work for any toolkit.
You have put your finger on it in the last sentence. If all of us
who want a non-GTK gui put some effort into 'generic work for any toolkit'
then we would probably get some results that would be considered
and probably accepted for inclusion into CVS. If just one person
developed one 'alternative gui' then 1) the scheme might not get finished,
and 2) it might not be accepted. I need to identify the generic work.
Is there a KDE project in place?
> > 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?
>
>I don't think a *move*, in the sense of "discard the GTK+ code entirely
>and use only wxWindows", would be the right thing to do.
That was possibly a poor choice of words, but 'port' somehow
felt wrong...
I imagined that it would be possible to take a snapshot of the
Ethereal code and apply a wxWindows coating to it, and then
remove superfluous GTK/Glib parts. In this way, one might get
several GUIs for the effort of porting to one.
>... I infer from your comment about
>spin buttons that some wxWindows widgets might not behave enough like
>the native widgets to make everybody happy).
That is a problem with cross-platform toolkits in general, but the
wxWindows project sets out to minimise it. I brought it up because
that control is quite difficult to implement in a generic form.
Obviously if it exists in GTK and MS Windows then you probably wouldn't
have been aware of it.
Unhappiness with the resulting interface is not commonly a feature
of wxWindows applications, unlike say AWT.
> > assuming that there remains work to do on the meat of Ethereal?
>
>I don't see a point in the near future - or probably even the
>medium-term future - when there *won't* be work to do on the meat of
>Ethereal.
Which is why moving (that word again) to a multi-GUI Ethereal ought
to be viewed as a considered re-factoring operation rather than a
gung-ho one. The sad thing is, that work on the 'meat' of Ethereal,
is probably agnostic w.r.t. interface.
Ben
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