On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 10:01 AM, Jameson Graef Rollins <[email protected]> wrote:
On Wed, Feb 28 2018, Pete Jemian <[email protected]> wrote:
> At this time, MEDM is an orphan piece of software. There are no
> developers assigned to maintain it. Fantastic that it still works and
> is still useful. Great job to its developers! MEDM's true end of life
> will coincide with that of MOTIF, which library it uses. Recently, some
> have made code changes in response to specific problems, but MEDM has no
> maintainer.
Despite it's annoying limitations, MEDM has a lot going for it. For
instance, the simplicity of the file format makes it easy to dynamically
generate screens, which is a very nice feature.
As
Pete and Andrew have pointed out, MEDM also has a lot NOT going for
it. These anti-features include "not supported" and "uses antiquated X
library that is itself poorly supported". We see real problems with
MEDM and modern X servers. More obviously, MEDM requires X11, which has
long been a significant and painful requirement for folks using Windows
and/or MacOS, and is a non-starter for people wanting to use Android or
iOS.
No one else has mentioned this, but MEDM has always been
simply horrible in handling fonts. It uses custom X11 font names that
require modifying the X11 font table. I am not aware of any other
software in regular use that makes such a poor choice. A display manager like MEDM is
fundamentally a graphical display program. Most of the objects it
displays being text. MEDM gets one of the most basic components of
displaying text (ie, fonts) absolutely wrong. It is not the cases that the choice made ~25 years ago was OK, and is now out-of-date: custom fonts for X11 were a
horrible choice 25 years ago too. MEDM has always done fonts wrong and anyone unfortunate enough to be using
MEDM is stuck with this problem and very poor fonts to this day.
MEDM
is OK for dynamically generating screens. It includes a quirky but
impressive home-built GUI generator. Qt Designer is far better. It may have a slight
learning curve for someone familiar only with MEDM, but it very good and
has many more features and is well-supported and widely used in other
contexts.
In short, there is nothing about MEDM that is not greatly improved by caQtDM.
At LIGO we're pretty stuck with MEDM just because of the sheer amount of
work required to translate and test all of our existing screens. This
problem exists no matter which new system we eventually decide to move
to, so a requirement for any new system is a good translator.
The
adl2ui translator is very good. We have translated more than 1500 adl
files to ui file and really use these (for the past couple years). The
only recurring translation problems have been
a)
groupings in MEDM do not translate well, and can leave unresponsive
areas of the screen. Ungrouping the adl files fixes this.
b) the space used by text boxes in MEDM is not enforced, probably related to its font handling being broken by design.
There is nothing to recommend MEDM.
