Re: [Octal-dev] porting thoughts

[Bullwinkle J. Moose]

i tryed out a version of GIMP for Win32 in roughly the middle of last year,
it was noticable slower than the Linux version and on some operations it was
painfully slow, and it did crash alot, and most of the reasons for crashing
were not very consistent.  i have no idea how much, if any, of that was
related to the GTK for win32 used with it, and it was several months ago, so
many of the problems may be fixed, i don't know.  Alternativly, there is
wxWindows (http://www.wxwindows.org/), it runs fairly, well on MS-Windows,
as well as on Linux and a few other Unicies, useing GTK, or Motif/Lestif, it
also has a Mac OS Port, and i have heard runnors about a BeOS port, as well
as a Version useing QT2...

How difficult do you supose it would be to create multiple GUIs for Octal?
Would it be reasonable to create a GKT interface for Linux/Un*x and BeOS,
and a then a wxWindows interface for MS-Windows and Mac OS?  If the User
Interface and the back end are sufficently seperate, so that different
Graphic (or even non-graphic) could easily be created and used, it could be
an advantage.  For intance, if a group af person were familiar with 'Bob's
Tacker', but felt that it was no longer being maintaned very well or not
very many machines very available for it and more, and they decided to
switch to Octal, some one could create a UI that was highly reminiscent of
Bob's Tracker, but wich used the Octal back end, it would be then easier for
all of the users of Bob's Tracker to move over to Octal.  Ofcoarse on the
other hand, haveing a single standardized UI has its advantages too...
i gess the question i want to ask is, how difficult would it be to write a
new UI for Octal?  and is there any thing that can be done to the rest of it
to make it easier to create UIs for it?