[Open-graphics] A really good immediate use for OGD1: PCI bus analyzer

[Nick LaForge]

On 1/1/07, Dieter <netbsd at sopwith.solgatos.com> wrote:

> X11 would seem to be the obvious choice.  I don't know much about
> GTK+ or its competators, but pick something that is as bug free as
> possible, and portable to at least the BSDs, Plan9, OS-X, Linux,
> Solaris, and to ILP32, LP64, big and little endian.  Does Plan9 do X11?

Plan 9 does do X11 -- see
http://cm.bell-labs.com/sources/extra/X11.iso.bz2 -- but "You really
don't want to use this. It's old and slow and only works well on 8-bit
displays."  X11 is standard, but it is also big and ugly.  GTK is
growing in bloat and gimmick faster than it can stabilize or
standardize.  Tk is simple, stable, and standard.  A 'web' interface
is like X11 --  web browsers are (actually much more than X11)
standard but also big and ugly.

Don't worry about creating a GUI for Plan 9 users.  Plan 9 programs
adhere to a paradigm that is quite different than what can be canned
with Tk -- programs taking standard input and giving standard output
are held together by Rc shell instances, running in Rio windows.  If
the data needs to be visualized, a program displays non-character
bitmap output through the Rio window.  Lumping the whole program in a
Tk interface violates the 'simple but good' software tools philosophy.
 So, don't worry about Plan9.  The users would either tear it down and
redo it 'The Plan 9 Way', or isolate it -- when foreign software is
big and ugly -- like X11 or firefox -- they just VNC to Linux.