Re: [therion-users] Therion a MacOS X 10.2.3 - working!!!

[Wookey]

On Fri 21 Feb, Martin Sluka wrote:
> May you explaine to me, please, what it means X, X11, wx, wxWindows, 
> etc. There is a slang I'm not able to understand.

'X', 'X11', and 'X window system' are all names for the common unix
graphical display system. An enormous number of applications are written to
work on top of X and it is available for a huge number of different
machines - not just unix. There are other display systems used for various
purposes but X is effectively 'standard' on unix systems. It is
intrisically networked so an application doesn't have to appear on your
computer display, it can appear on any other over the network you have
access to.

X is a low-level system concerned with pixels on screens. For modern
applications an intermediate library is used to deal with icons, borders,
dialog boxes etc in order to give a consistent feel to applications (and
make programers lives easier) - there are a number of these such as GTK, QT
and motif.

wxwindows ('wx' is a contraction) is a system allowing cross-platform use
of these intermediate libraries and lower-level systems. Essentially it
allows you to write an application that can be run on MS Windows or X+GTK
systems, or plain X or MacOS or whatever - it worries about the differences
between the underlying display implementations.

> Way is not the best idea to compile survex with X11 - configure is 
> evidenly looking for it?

Survex has three different cave display programs. The original 'caverot'
which is only used for RISCOS and DOS these days, the equivalent 'xcaverot'
which is the same thing running on X and the new (and much more versatile
and portable) 'aven'.

xcaverot is now generally deprecated as it is horribly written and
difficult to extend or maintain. It is only useful when for some reason
aven cannot be used (insufficient resources (eg on a palmtop), or libraries
not available).

> You people of Unix understand each other, but for me, foreigner, it 
> is very difficult...
> 
> To read hundreds pages of documentation and experiment hours and 
> hours is not a way for me.

Don't worry. The survex team is on the case and will sort it out for you.
The remote login you provide will make this much easier for us, and survex
will finally be available for the mac as well as everything else.

Just poke the survex list once a month to check that you haven't been
forgotten :-)

xcaverot could almost certainly be made to work but we are much better off
spending our time getting aven to work as the wxwindows infastructure to
allow this is now ready. The reason it hasn't happened earlier is that
wxwindows for MacOS wasn't available until recently.

HTH

Wookey
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