Re: [Octal-dev] porting thoughts

[Bullwinkle J. Moose]

Actualy, what was going threw my mind was something similar to what VIM has done
since about v5.4.  At compile time you can specify weather weather or not to 
use an
Athena interface, a Motif/Lestif interface, or a GTK interface.  If you don't
explicitly specify one to use use, the one will be chosen for you.  In that 
maner,
you end up with one exicutable file, with one interface, but you get to choose 
wich
Tool Kit to use for that interface (to a certain extent).  Is it excesivly 
difficult
to do that?  and is it difficult to add new interfaces to the mix?  (i haven't
actually looked at the VIM code to see how they do it).
On the other hand, the idea of haveing two fully seperate binary files running, 
and
communicating with some sort Client / Server mesage passing mechanism present a
great deal of posibility.  (would CORBA be at all aplicable for this?)  It 
sounds as
if it would posible to arange it so that the controling signals are then comming
from almost anywhere, like perhapse an external MIDI controler?  Or another
application, a sequencer maybe?  All of that in addition to being able to have 
the
interface mach what ever Interface you are useing at the time (GNOME, KDE,
AfterStep, Bash, ...) But all the flexibility, while makeing for an extremly
powerfull app, will also add a great deal of complexity, Is it worth it?
If the Backend and the interface are seperated to that degree, it would be 
posible
for each to follow along on its own development track, so the backend could get 
at
least close to 1.0 status by summers end, focusing strictly on doing the job of
being back end as well as possible, but then the interface would have to catch 
up...

Is it worth it?  Is all the flexability and power worth the slightly more 
complex
development track?
i would think it is, but that it just my opinion...