jrg@Apple.COM (John R. Galloway) (03/30/89)
A while ago I was contracted to port the client side of X to a Sys V system (whose vendor shall remain nameless). We took two appraches, first to port stock 11.3 using a 3rd party (CMC) socket lib and second to port AT&Ts XWIN (which is 11.2) and OpenLook. I found the first project relatively easy. Just a few changes here and there and it came up. The MIT folks have really done a nice job. Unfortunately the CMC socket lib we were using did not support timeouts in their select call or selecting on a pty, so it limped but didn't even crawl (i.e. xterm didn't have a hope, xclock would only update if given an external event etc.). But my point here is that the 11.3 tape was easy to deal with, Imake is great. Since this was a Sys V shop, I recomemded that they go with AT&T if at all possible so we got a BETA (keep that in mind) vesion of XWIN (based on 11.2) and OpenLook. I did get XWIN to work in time for Uniform (which was the goal) but not OpenLook. The main problem with both was just logistics. It is clear that neither of these products have ever been compiled by AT&T on anything other than the AT&T 6386, bitmap.c for example will not compile if i386 is not defined. Note that AT&T never said otherwise, but having had little trouble with stock 11.3 I had assumed that a vendor port of (11.2) would not be harder to use, that they would not have gone out of their way to make it non-portable. But that seems to me (yes I may be warped) to have been the result. Some of the AT&T imake files for example chnage items like SYSDEFINES (or was it SYSLIBRARIES) i.e. stuff that is not nice to chnage. Blatent stuff like xterm calling getptname() with out an argument, and getptname dereferences it in the first line, and this executes on a 6386? Anyway the point of this is that I had assumed (AT&T did NOT promise this) porting AT&T's version of X to a Sys V system would certainly be no harder than porting the stock MIT verions to Sys V. I stand corrected. And now a quick opnion of the AT&T window manager (this is the XWIN window manager, that I assume (perhaps wrong again) is much like the OpenLook version). Personally, I do not like it at all. I have no problem with the idea of extending uwm (or others) to allow for the fact that a novice user comming up to an X workstation has no idea of what to do. So putting sizing corners on windows etc is fine. But I do not see that doing so need take away the existing functionality of using "unadvertised" mouse/key functions. In the same direction putting in some default programs for the window manager to display in its program menu is fine, but why take away the ability to edit your .uwmrc file and change or at least add to the menus? (the docs I got gave no indicate that attwm is alterable by .umrc or resource methods). Having an unalterable base look and feel and set of functionality need not constrain the system to not allow extensions. Does it? Finally a word of caution to those who which to run XWIN on a PC X server. I was using PC-XSIGHT version 1.1 (which does not use extended memroy) and found that with attwm running I could only run 1 client, starting a second client would run the server out of memory. Without attwm 5 or 6 clients could be running. So personally I think I will avoid the AT&T X products, and stick to the stock MIT stuff (though at home I am still using 10.4 :-) . apple!jrg John R. Galloway, Jr. contract programmer, San Jose, Ca These are my views, NOT Apple's, I am a GUEST here, not an employee!!