moraes@cs.toronto.edu (Mark Moraes) (01/14/90)
[Sigh. One for the frequently asked questions file, perhaps? What the various toolkits are and where they come from?] tmcclory@gomer.wright.edu (Tom McClory) writes: > 1) My current project is to gain some mastery of one of the X > toolkits. To that end I've purchased Doug Young's book, > "X Window Systems Programming and Applications with Xt." > Judging from some of the postings over the past few days, the HP > widget set used in Mr. Young's examples goes away in release 4. > Is this true, and what, if anything can I do to compensate? No, it isn't true. The HP widget set is in R4, in contrib/toolkits/Xw. At least two applications in R4 contrib (xpic, xwebster) use Xw, and the fact that the first version of Doug Young's book used it was part of the motivation to keep it in R4 contrib. To get versions straight: The widget set was contributed for X.V11R3 by HP in contrib/widgets/Xhp. That version only works with the X.V11R2 X toolkit intrinsics (Xt) -- an improved version of R2 Xt was also in contrib/widgets/Xhp. The X toolkit intrinsics changed rather drastically from R2 to R3, enough to break just about every widget ever written. Martin Friedmann <martin@citi.umich.edu> and John Carlson, <carlson@tis.llnl.gov> fixed Xw to work with R3 Xt. This was Xhp.R3.tar.Z available on expo.lcs.mit.edu and other archive sites before the release of R4. That version (plus a couple of fixes) is the one in R4. I'm told it has been seen to run under R4beta, but I haven't yet built them for R4. Since Xt has not changed too much from R3 to R4, they should continue to work. They are not supported by HP (I believe HP has them in a product release for R2 for HP workstations) and are sort of orphans, albeit very useful orphans. If they misbehave with you, the recommended operating procedure is to dig out your favourite editor, debugger, the source code, and convince them otherwise. (We'd like to hear of the fixes...) Doug Young's book has been rewritten for Motif, the OSF widget set. (which is supposedly part of the Xw family tree, possibly derived from an earlier version of the widgets that had the 3D appearance) I'm sure some vendor will be happy to sell you Motif; it is likely that some vendors will ship Motif as part of their OS release, or X release. Approximate equivalents/supersets/subsets of these widgets exist in most of the other widget sets (the Athena widgets mit/lib/Xaw, and the Cornell widgets contrib/toolkits/Xcu)