Re: Motif 2.1 and EPICS

[Thomas.Birke@bii.bessy.de]

>>>>> "Chris" == Christopher Larrieu <larrieu@jlab.org> writes:

 Chris>   I'm kind of curious how many EPICS sites have access
 Chris> to Motif 2.1.  Would anybody be upset if newer releases of
 Chris> graphical tools depended upon features introduced by the more
 Chris> recent api?  Likewise, does anybody have a deep-seated fear of
 Chris> moving on to X11R6 to gain such nice features as transparent
 Chris> printing, etc. ?

I don't know whether big vendors (HP, SUN...) support Motif 2.1. At least HP
delivers even new machines with Motif 1.2 and a X11R5 compliant X-server
(correct me if I'm wrong). There are also X11R6-libraries for development,
but I didn't get into detail with X11R6-features (both in client- and
server-features) yet.

Besides this (there should be at least 3rd party Motif2.1 ports available
for all major platforms) I'd like to support new features in upcoming
releases of graphical tools.

IMHO these are two different things:

     * Motif2.1 shouldn't be a problem because both versions of libraries
       (1.2 and 2.1) could be used in parallel

     * X11R6 (e.g. for transparent printing) might be difficult for users
       of vendor-specific environments. Switching the X-server from R5 to
       R6 could mean switching the whole environment (HP-VUE, CDE...) which
       might cause a little trouble.

I'm a little bit scared of switching a vendor-supplied and *-supported*
environment, that works fine but is a little bit out of date, to a third
party product with vague support of future OS-versions/hardware for the
production system. But this should not impede development of new tools,
because at least Linux as a client-platform is not concerned with all these
problems. And maybe even HP switches to full X11R6/Motif 2.x support one
day...

BTW: Did anybody collect information about the availability of
e.g. Motif2.1-libraries/X11R6-servers for major platforms (or is HP the
only vendor that is still stuck on X11R5/Motif1.2 ;-)?

Thomas

_______________________________________________________________________
 /homas Birke           BESSY II            Thomas.Birke@bii.bessy.de