[NTLUG:Discuss] Re: has anyone used Alexandria?

[Kevin Brannen]

Bryan J. Smith wrote:

>On Sat, 2004-12-18 at 08:26, Kevin Brannen wrote:
>  
>
> ...
>
>>  Until last night, I was 
>>going to say "I *will* make this work!"  I'm not so sure I'm going to 
>>take that attitude now. :-(  I may be invested enough time in it, and I 
>>should just give up and work on another program I found (Thokbook) that 
>>actually does work, but is a bit primitive -- which I can fix. :-)
>>    
>>
>
>I hear you.  Sounds like the developer really didn't get specifics
>down.  You may need a different version of the libraries, etc..., stuff
>that is difficult to solve without distributed package management.
>  
>

Stuff that is difficult to solve when you can't even figure out why it's 
not working!

>>This really makes me long for the days of C and X/Motif,
>>    
>>
>
>Which is one of the reasons why I avoid a lot of tools that have full
>KDE or GNOME bindings, and prefer just Qt or GTK+.  So I do understand
>your points.
>
>BTW, do you mean C and X/Motif, or C and X/Xt?  Because there are a
>number of C programs that use Xt directly (with some GTK+ hints without
>GNOME).  They are very fast and light.  Although X/GTK+ or X/Qt aren't
>much slower either.
>  
>

X/Motif or X/Xt...whatever.  The difference is in what widget set you 
use, the dependency list is 1 extra set of header files and 1 extra lib 
(or two if you need Xpm).  The effort to get an X program (even if Motif 
is involved) to compile and work is trivial compare to getting a gnome 
&| gtk with their millions of little libs.  What little KDE (QT) 
programs I've compiled weren't too hard, but still harder than plain X 
ones.  Oh well, that's life sometimes.

>>as then all the support libs (minus X & Motif) I needed would be sub-dirs
>>and readily available.  This also makes me more fully understand why
>>some people think Linux is hard, something for me to keep in mind when
>>I work on future packages for others.
>>    
>>
>
>Well, if you are a developer, I don't care what OS you're developing
>for, some tools are just "hard" in general. ...
>

And why is that exactly?  I'm not disagreeing with you, after all, the 
main software I support at work would fall in to the "hard" category, 
but that's because it is so complex because of all the 3rd party tools 
and integration required to make it work (which also makes it fragile 
IMO); and it also tries to do a lot (maybe more than it should but I'm 
not responsible for that. :-)

Is it possible to get too modular?  The opposite extreme of what 
Microsoft does, where everything is integrated into 1 huge software 
thing that's hard to break apart?  Hmm, but I bet MS's [OS] software is 
hard too.  I know I've seen articles on software complexity where they 
discuss number of entry/exit points, functions, and the like to come up 
with a complexity rating.  Maybe the thing to keep in mind is "do one 
thing well", then we're left with arguing what "one thing" is, 
task/system/etc. :-)  Oh well, enough philosophy...

Kevin