Re: gEDA-dev: Next gEDA release?

[Ben Jackson <ben-at-NOSPAMben_dot_com>]

On Mon, Dec 10, 2007 at 07:48:43AM -0500, Stuart Brorson wrote:
> 
> Related question:  Is PCB's GTK HID in a decent enough shape to have a
> release to the masses?  Based upon the complaints I have read here, I
> am wondering.....

I just ran through a bunch of exercises with the GTK HID, and my conclusion
is that there are serious issues with the GTK HID that cannot be easily
remedied by a few patches.

The pros and cons seem to fall like this:  The lesstif hid is much better
behaved.  It has better drawing performance.  The gtk hid makes more of
the obvious stuff visible like layer selection and visibility and the
toolbox (when using the lesstif HID I almost always immediately 'tear off'
the 'shown layers', 'route styles' and often the 'grid' submenus).  The
GTK HID draws on some better dialogs, like the file selector.

The lesstif hid needs help in terms of "newbie accessibility".  I think it
should have some real toolboxes instead of just buried, tearable menus, and
they should appear in addition to the work area at startup.  The entire
menu hierarchy should be gutted and replaced.

The gtk hid needs help in terms of correctness of behavior and performance.
My impression of the internals is that it may need a complete rewrite to
be sane.  There's some highly suspect code in there.

Realistically speaking, the PCB project can't really sustain two complete
user interfaces.  I understand that the user community is voting for GTK,
but the developer community seems to have voted for lesstif.

-- 
Ben Jackson AD7GD
<ben@ben.com>
http://www.ben.com/


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