From: Thomas Berlage
Subject: Re: Porting Lucid/SunOS to Allegro/Solaris
Date:
Message-ID: <3j1htq$a6e@omega.gmd.de>
In article <······················@ptolemy-ethernet.arc.nasa.gov>, ···@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov (k p c) wrote:
> Quoth ·······@oahu.cs.ucla.edu (Greg Frazier):
> > We need to know how difficult it will be to port an application
> > from Lucid Common Lisp running under SunOS to Allegro Common Lisp
> > running under Solaris. Of particular interesit - do the Motif
> > bindings change? Thanks for any feedback!
>
> I use on SunOS, and I am trying to port, with a GREAT DEAL of
> difficulty, Gina/CLM 2.3. CLM's are the only Motif bindings for CL
> that I have used, but I think there are one or two others. Perhaps
> Lucid has Motif built in. Allegro does not, that I know of.
>
> CL and EL have been trivial to port. CLM/Gina remains very difficult
> and it is still crashing on me, although it now compiles and loads.
> Everything else (programs and shell scripts) is in between.
>
I have put a patch for CLM 2.3 to work with Solaris on
ftp.gmd.de:/gmd/gina/CLM2.3onSolaris
I hope this solves the problems. There are people that have no problems after this patch. Unfortunately I do not have the time to include the patches in CLM.
If there are further problems, there is the GINA mailing list (··········@gmd.de, to be added, mail to ··················@gmd.de) where you can find further answers.
> It would be very nice if there were a widely used, easy to use, widely
> portable user interface system for CL. But I don't know of one,
> though I have read the FAQ, and have considered some of the systems
> described in it. Maybe it is still too early and we have a few more
> years.
>
GINA seems to have gained a little bit of that status. At least it is free and we also think that it is widely portable. Unfortunately, we do not have the resources for further development, so we have to rely on contributions from others. Any volunteers are welcome, we could even host guest researchers that want to do research and development in the area of GINA and user interfaces.
Hope this helps.
Thomas Berlage (·······@gmd.de)
GMD, HCI Research Division (FIT.MMK)
53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany
Quoth ·······@gmd.de (Thomas Berlage) quoting me:
> > It would be very nice if there were a widely used, easy to use, widely
> > portable user interface system for CL. But I don't know of one,
> GINA seems to have gained a little bit of that status. At least it
I like Gina's simplicity and composability (CLOS, row-column, form)
and would be happy if something like it were really widely portable.
What I mean by "widely portable" is actually much very demanding:
o All versions of Unix by typing "./configure;make" or
something similar (this one really appeals to me, since I
have spent weeks on trying to get CLM to work on Solaris
with either of two versions of Motif and either of two
versions of X). It would just ask where the libraries are
and do everything else automatically.
o All common versions of CL
o DOS, Windows, Macintosh, Windows NT. This would be done
either by providing a common interface or by using local
libraries as a back end. In either case it would minimize
API changes from system to system as much as possible.
o Maybe other toolkits as a back end, possibly including TK
This might be too much to ask of the 1990's and maybe it's a new
millenium kind of thing to want, but we can dream out loud on the net.
:-) My dream is not to have to deal with different ways of doing
things on different systems, and especially to install easily. I
think what I'm angling for is to be able to know that on any given
platform, a full-featured CL application will be able to run. I know
that it is a lot of work, and that it will take time to develop, and
that there are some portability differences that must be encountered.
Back in the 1990's, I'm still having trouble installing (or porting)
Gina/CLM on Solaris. I look forward to trying your patch once I get
it to apply (my version of patch, at least, appears not to be entirely
pleased with it). Thank you VERY much for making it available. It
will be a huge relief to me once Gina runs on Solaris. I will then
know that I will not have to rewrite my UI for another package or use
SunOS 4.1.3 again.