Steve Underwood wrote:
Installing lesstif is a waste of time. Its a useless piece of junk,
and people like RedHat and other distribution vendors are to blame.
It was moving alone nicely until they decided OpenMotif was good. By
the time they decided it was bad people had given up working on
lesstif. Maybe it was all a big plot to kill off the motif world
completely.
Motif had plenty of time to make itself available before anyone tried
to clone it. You don't need to blame anyone else for killing it off.
> Whatever the
cause, it now means using Grace, Nedit and a few other favourites is
a right PITA with Fedora.
Yes, if Motif had been open, or lesstif had worked from the start, a
lot of things could be about a decade ahead of where they are now...
Well, that seems like a totally meaningless response, lacking any
connection with history.
Do you have a timeline for the events? I thought that for many years
after the CDE standardization work and the Motif implementation of it
the code was restricted - to the point that lesstif was unable to
legally duplicate its functionality and alternatives were written from
scratch.
> OpenMotif was made open.
But not by any of the open source definitions of the word.
The distros, like RedHat went for it and
dropped support for lesstif, killing its development.
How many years of development did it have before that without being
completed? I think it was dead long before RedHat had any affect on it.
Later, they
decided OpenMotif wasn't open enough after all - seems like a case of a
lack of due diligence - but by this time lesstif had withered and died.
Even before...
Now they have put a totally useless lesstif back into their distros, and
carry on as if nothing is wrong. The only snag is nothing requiring a
motif environment actually works properly.
And they never did - which is why there are only a few packages that
require it. Unfortunately they are the ones that cared about following
standards at the time...
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
