Re: wxWindows and GNOME

[Robert Roebling <roebling uni-freiburg de>]

On Fri, 27 Aug 1999, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> I think to include wxWindows with GNOME we'd want to see support for the
> GNOME platform, not just GTK+ - any plans to include that?

Well, adding GNOME features to wxWindows wouldnŽt be hard at all,
but there are a number of PROs and CONs to consider.

Here in my country, 90% of the people use SuSE and 90% of them
use KDE. Am I supposed to restrict the possible user base of my
library to the maybe 10%, maybe 20% of Linux computers? wxGTK is
also used on Solaris and Irix quite often and you cannot imagine
how many people complained about having to install 1 library, donŽt
mention GNOME to them.

With this mind, we have added much of the functionality of 
GNOME to wxWindows itself, which includes

- configuration management
- help system
- common dialogs
- PostScript printing
- (beginning) Unicode support
- HTML canvas

but which sadly excludes a few features, which have been requested,
but cannot be implemented without GNOME libs, such as session support
and standard mime-type bindings (with icons). There might have been
some more, but these were the two I remember.

This doesnŽt mean that weŽll never support GNOME. What seems very
attractive to me is the upcoming Unicode/Uniscript support and better
printing and once that is in use, IŽll probably make use of it.
I also have started work on wxOLE, using Bonobo for the GTK version
and I have rewritten a relevant number of internals to make wxGTK
work with Bonobo. Sadly, the constant changes to Bonobo would have
required me to use the whole of GNOME-libs CVS to continue work on
this, so I had to interrupt it.

  Robert

Robert Roebling <roebling@ruf.uni-freiburg.de>