mc@moc.jpl.nasa.gov (Mike Caplinger) (02/16/90)
Are there plans to produce a better automatic tool to convert SunView 1 programs to XView form? The one released with FCS XView is really not adequate -- I don't think the generation of warning comments with code that doesn't work is appropriate behavior. In particular, colormap segments are handled badly. Sun seems to be ignoring applications (such as image processing systems) that *must have* access to the entire colormap in favor of things like drawing tools, that use a few fixed colors. (Admittedly, they got this bias from X, but NeWS was even less realistic in that it didn't even admit that the colormap existed.) Secondly, retained canvases just aren't supported in XView so far as I can tell. Given that the vast majority of simple applications will break horribly if their retained canvases go away, I'm a little skeptical about easy SunView->XView ports. I tried to port a relatively simple SunView image display application to XView. The automatically converted code was just wrong. After about a day of concerted effort, the application only barely worked, the colormap management was still badly flawed, and I was really afraid that XView porting was a lot harder than Sun was selling it as. Anybody have any other evidence one way or the other? Mike Caplinger, mc@moc.jpl.nasa.gov ASU/Caltech Mars Observer Camera Project