Dislin breaks 37 libraries on Fedora 8

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Sun Mar 23 16:45:37 UTC 2008


Steve Underwood wrote:
>>>>   
>>> Installing lesstif is a waste of time. Its a useless piece of junk, 
>>> and people like RedHat and other distribution vendors are to blame. 
>>> It was moving alone nicely until they decided OpenMotif was good. By 
>>> the time they decided it was bad people had given up working on 
>>> lesstif. Maybe it was all a big plot to kill off the motif world 
>>> completely.
>>
>> Motif had plenty of time to make itself available before anyone tried 
>> to clone it.  You don't need to blame anyone else for killing it off.
>>
>> > Whatever the
>>> cause, it now means using Grace, Nedit and a few other favourites is 
>>> a right PITA with Fedora.
>>
>> Yes, if Motif had been open, or lesstif had worked from the start, a 
>> lot of things could be about a decade ahead of where they are now...
>>
> 
> Well, that seems like a totally meaningless response, lacking any 
> connection with history.

Do you have a timeline for the events?  I thought that for many years 
after the CDE standardization work and the Motif implementation of it 
the code was restricted - to the point that lesstif was unable to 
legally duplicate its functionality and alternatives were written from 
scratch.

 > OpenMotif was made open.

But not by any of the open source definitions of the word.

> The distros, like RedHat went for it and 
> dropped support for lesstif, killing its development.

How many years of development did it have before that without being 
completed?  I think it was dead long before RedHat had any affect on it.

> Later, they 
> decided OpenMotif wasn't open enough after all - seems like a case of a 
> lack of due diligence - but by this time lesstif had withered and died. 

Even before...

> Now they have put a totally useless lesstif back into their distros, and 
> carry on as if nothing is wrong. The only snag is nothing requiring a 
> motif environment actually works properly.

And they never did - which is why there are only a few packages that 
require it.  Unfortunately they are the ones that cared about following 
standards at the time...

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com





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