mss+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Mark Steven Sherman) (10/27/87)
We're very eager to let you see it. But we are more eager to get it shaken down and documented for a December X tape than to have earlier versions hit the streets. However, a couple technical comments in response to your question. 1) Same binaries. Well, yes and no. We use an object-oriented system that can dynamically load in objects. The interaction manager object and graphics object provide an interface that is implemented by your favorite system. We dynamcially load in the window manager subclass of choice. So yes, the "real" objects and system support libraries are the same binaries, but somewhere underneath, a different object was loaded for different window systems. (I personally run both Andrew and X on the same machine but on different screens. The same Andrew Toolkit (nee BE2) programs on both displays share the same program segment and so don't really take a lot of room.) 2) BE2 and the Andrew user-interface are similar but distinct. For example, the idea of a tiling window manager is Andrew-like but unrelated to the Andrew Toolkit. To the best of knowledge, there will also be a window manager called cwm in the Andrew Toolkit that does provide an Andrew-like environment, e.g., tiling windows. However, I have run Andrew Toolkit applications under wm and uwm, and I have run other X applications under cwm (fish is particularly good for providing a load). Some aspects of "Andrew" are provided by the Andrew Toolkit, e.g., interpretation of left button and right button for scrolling, and these should look the same under all reasonable implementations of the interaction manager. We can't stop anyone from rewriting the im object to interpret a capital A as a left mouse click, but you are sure to confuse users. I would hope that anyone porting the Andrew Toolkit to NeWS would follow the spirit of the system, and when it is told to post menus, it would call the "standard" menu system in lite (or whatever). We know that X is all mechanism and no policy, so we have to do some work ourselves. -Mark