Thanks for your thoughtful response. I am including the
wxWindows developers in this dialog, as this topic is very relevant
to their efforts [by the way, cc'ing the wxWindows mailing list didn't
seem to work so I am putting that address in the "To:" field on this
message and hopefully it will make it through -- I have forwarded
our previous messages].
Let me respond to a couple of your points:
> As Jeff mentioned, we have indeed examined wxWindows in the past. It
> didn't seem quite ready enough for us to make a committment to it.
> However, their current stuff looks very neato.
I'm sure the wxWindows development team will appreciate your
compliments. ;)
> I think it's probably too late for us to make a switch. "If it works,
> don't mess with it", right? :-)
...unless there are still significant porting efforts going on. Then it
might make sense to follow your suggestions below to port AbiWord
to wxWindows and then put all porting resources into the wxWindows
effort.
> I see very few conceptual obstacles to making this idealistic world
> view a reality. After all, the standard C library is quite portable.
> Extending the same concept to GUI and graphics is clearly a much
> harder problem, but surely not an impossible one.
>
> However, I've been doing XP development for a very long time. I
> haven't seen a silver bullet yet.
I agree with you, but I also think that wxWindows is just about
there. With more developer fingers typing in code, wxWindows
could be ported to every known OS and have every wiz-bang
feature you want in very short order.
> I concede the attractiveness of your point: As Open Source projects,
> if we all collaborated together on XP technologies and tools, we would
> make more forward progress on reaching the common goal we both want.
Exactly. It pains me to see the fragmentation of efforts that is going
on right now. There is so much more that can be done if the XP
community starts working together instead of reinventing the wheel
each time.
> However, I don't yet agree with your belief that we can currently do
> so "without compromising the quality of the resulting applications."
>
> Or, at the very least, I doubt we can do so without compromising the
> *schedule* of those applications.
Point taken (see below).
> I'll end this note with a challenge: From the point of view of
> AbiWord, wxWindows can be treated as a platform. Why not write a
> wxWindows implementation of the "platform-specific" portions of
> AbiWord?
This is exactly what I was thinking -- I guess great minds think
alike. :)
> I don't think anyone on the core team has time to tackle
> that task right now. However, we've made it pretty darn easy to write
> new platforms. And, the Win32 version would probably make a nice
> starting point.
>
> A sufficiently motivated person who wanted to claim that wxWindows
> could make our other platform implementations obsolete could certainly
> try to prove it. :-)
I will meet your challenge with another challenge: If a wxWindows
port of AbiWord was completed and it functioned well, would the
AbiWord group be willing to use wxWindows as its standard
interface and move its porting efforts into wxWindows?
Let's strike a deal. :)
wxWindows developers: Anybody interested in tackling this
challenge??? (see: http://www.abisource.com for more info)
Regards,
Tom Ryan
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