Subject: Re: XP dialogs
jrb@redhat.com
Date: Sat Feb 10 2001 - 19:16:40 CST
Martin Sevior <msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au> writes:
> On Sat, 10 Feb 2001, Aaron Lehmann wrote:
> > > too daunting task to create all dialogs *once again* for a new platform
> > > (i.e. we're wasting time doing this over and over, and over again). We also
> > > have a maintenance nightmare that if any dialog gets changed for one
> > > platform we have to (currently) change it three times more for the other
> > > ones.
<snip>
Ugh. This way lies madness...
As another datapoint, mc also took this approach, with it's curses,
tcl/tk, and gtk+ front end. The result was a total nightmare to
maintain and extend, not to mention really ugly dialogs.
One of the problems is that your internal widget set necessarily has to
be a lowest-common denominator based one, which means you have no room
for dealing with the peculiarities of a platform (let alone take
advantage of some of its features.) We ended up special casing all the
dialogs anyway for the GNOME frontend, totally negating any advantage
you might otherwise get.
Abiword's current approach of wrapping the data classes with the UI
dialog seems to work pretty well, and is what we ended up trying to
morph mc into.
Been through that Hell,
-Jonathan
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