Does the project accept patches to old X11 applications to get them working again? I've recently been tinkering with xfm, would love to contribute my retooling to such an effort. - Matt G. ------- Original Message ------- On Sunday, December 25th, 2022 at 10:15 AM, Michelangelo De Simone <michel(a)ngelo.eu> wrote:

At 2022-12-25T10:15:19-0800, Michelangelo De Simone wrote: It looks like this must have just gotten started. All that is present is xtartan. Which I do at least remember. :) Library support is going to be an issue for a lot of X11 legacy apps. I remember that the XForms widget library used to be proprietary, and I recall that it had been freed, but not that this had been done 20 years ago now[1][2]...albeit still too late to have made itself the center of the Linux desktop environment, as it could have been if only the copyright holders had not clung so tightly to The Precious. Motif and XView similarly got freed (the latter quite early in fact, as I recall...but night had already fallen for the SunView UI). But two tooklit variants I've heard of, I've never found out if they ever made their sources freely available: OLIT and MoOLIT. As I understand it, OLIT was XView, but written on top of the X Toolkit Intrinsics library (Xt) as opposed to bypassing it and going straight to libX11. And MoOLIT was, apparently, some kind of shim--whether it supplemented OLIT or replaced it, I am not sure--that, like XForms and Java's AWT, allowed you to to write a "look-and-feel-neutral" application. As I recall, such efforts often failed because they abstracted only the intersection of available features rather than the union of them, so except for very simple UIs, programs didn't look or behave "idiomatically" anyway. I'd be curious to hear people's recollections of these and especially to learn of any pointers to source. Ranging a bit farther afield, I wonder similarly about Sun's NeWS, which I never saw in the flesh. Regards, Branden [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110718230734/http://xforms-toolkit.org/ Nowadays its web site does not even mention its proprietary past. [2] Before that relicensing, I was part of a team at Progeny Linux Systems that was contracted by HP to port xforms (and a lot of other stuff) to IA-64. xforms was given to me because I was "the X guy" on staff. I don't remember it being difficult--just the usual long/int punning issues. I don't recollect now whether xforms had already been ported to Alpha or SPARC V9; it seems to me that it should have been by 2001, or would have been, had it been FLOSS. Great merriment was had in those days dogging on IA-64, but the more I learned about that ISA the more I liked it compared it to x86, though that may be damning it with faint praise. But apparently IA-64 made novel demands with respect to instruction sequencing that caused compiler writers--or perhaps more accurately the people who would have to pay compiler writers--squeal like pigs in hot oil. Intel had a similar "fiasco" with the iAPX 432 fifteen years before; that was the ISA for which, infamously, "Ada [was the] intended primary language for application programming." Ada was also reviled, ostenisbly because it was too damn hard to write a compiler for it, but probably also because its keyword inventory more closely resembled Pascal than C, which was already starting to eat the world in the mid-1980s. Strangely enough, as I understand it, the compiler innovations demanded by Ada and IA-64, respectively, came to be standard and expected, and their benefits enjoyed unthinkingly by x86 and C advocates. Thus do we reward innovation in this industry.

Branden, You may find this fellow’s archaeological dig on NeWS and PostScript interesting: https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/788053163857379328 He also attempted to make a NeWS clone: http://dev.rsnous.com/dewdrop/executive/ (source available). Josh

On Sun, Dec 25, 2022 at 1:52 PM G. Branden Robinson < g.branden.robinson(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: If you go read their Mastodon feed, you'll see that there's a bunch of others... Indeed... There was quite the diversity back in the day... Yea, it was one of many early contenders. Yea, XView was actually free from the start (or almost the start), but the SunView UII and programming model was a bit of a rough fit with X11 and never caught on, even though XView was widely ported. Motif was freed a few years later, in time for it to be used by a few projects before people moved on to things like Gnome and Qt. Now those are two toolkits I've not heard of in a long time... Yes. OLIT implemented the OpenLook look and feel in the intrinsics programming model. It shared no code with XView, though. Sun was big on pushing OpenLook back in the day. IIRC, and we're reaching back across 30 years at this point, MoOLIT was an attempt to implement both interaction models in one toolkit. Yes. It was a poor implementation of all of them, and only kinda sorta looked right. It was OK for some things, but serious programs had big issues scaling. I never was able to get my hands on binaries, despite trying to order them, let alone sources. They wouldn't ship them to Solbourne for some reason (well, the reason is below). NeWS was about 3 years before OpenLook, etc. So I spent the 4 years just out of college in my second job at Solboune and later ParkPlace and Openware. I did the OI toolkit and UIB interface builder. It was a C++ toolkit that implemented both Open Looks (both 2d and 3d variants) and Motif. It did it in a neutral manner that allowed better layout than most other toolkits of the time (many other multi-model toolkits had issues where they'd render incorrectly if the fonts changed, or the model added 3d noo-dads that were different sizes for OpenLook and Motif). The interface builder I worked on would allow people to create real programs since it would create the right subclasses for you, allow you to expand the base toolkit either through composition of base objects, or via your own custom widgets. I even engineered the OI giveaway for Linux in the 0.99 days.... But the C++ ABI issues meant it never went anywhere... Sadly, there's little online about this toolkit these days. I found the following, which just gives the business news and no taste of the cool technology: https://techmonitor.ai/technology/att_takes_solbournes_c_object_library_for… https://techmonitor.ai/technology/parcplace_systems_buys_solbournes_c_tool_… and an early paper on the technology before the automatic layout code was added: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Encapsulating-a-C%2B%2B-Library-Linto… It was a cool ride... I can dig up more info if people are interested... Warner

Is this limited to X11? The oldest X version I have seen around is X10R3, but rumor has it earlier versions exist on tapes which have not yet been read. We're also missing W.