mb> Do we have to subclass the Athena widgets? It's that or rewrite our event loop to be compatible with a modern widget set such as GTK, isn't it? Or abandon the goal of a modern look interface. Obviously it's possible to to subclassing right (even mechanically, cf C++); we should look for enhanced Athena widget sets that do so, and recommend them, maybe even refuse to ./configure the bad ones. The problem here is that we really need a multiple inheritance mechanism (3D-ness is orthogonal to functionality like tabs and gauges) when we subclass from Athena, whereas 3D aspects are part of the base classes for modern widget sets. This was poorly thought through for Xaw3d, but maybe some of the other enhanced sets did a better job (or got lucky)? Another solution is to mandate (through configure) static linking of the 3D widget sets that cause crashes when dynamically linked to incompatible libraries. Is that feasible? (Yes, I know it probably adds >250kB to the executable. If that's what the user wants, what's wrong with it?) -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 _________________ _________________ _________________ _________________ What are those straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."

Ben> "Stephen J. Turnbull" wrote: mb> Do we have to subclass the Athena widgets? Ben> Explain? ?? Don't we want all the modern interface elements like tabs and real pushbuttons in C and progress bars and sliders and so on? I don't much care for myself, but a lot of people seem to think that's important to XEmacs TNG (you among them, I thought). I agree that probably would broaden XEmacs's appeal. But we've had the GTK discussion in the last year or so, and basically gtk insists on a non-Xt-compatible event loop. ThusHaveIBeenInformed. OTOH, using Athena as the base for those things means subclassing. And everybody seems to detest working with the Lucid widgets, although they were good for their time. That leaves us with the choice I posed. -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 _________________ _________________ _________________ _________________ What are those straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."

Andy Piper wrote: Unfortunately not. If you subclass any of the non-composite Athena widgets (Command, Grip, Label, MenuButton, Repeater, Scrollbar, SmeBSB, StripChart, Toggle), you will run into problems if the header files don't match the library. In theory, this problem could occur with any library. However, as anyone who's been watching this list for the last month will be aware, libXaw is notorious for being replaced with an "enhanced" version which isn't compatible with the real thing. -- Glynn Clements <glynn(a)sensei.co.uk&gt;