newbie resource temporarily unavailable

[Glynn Clements]

pk wrote:

> > FYI
> > perhaps this is correct for desktop but there are several applications
> > in the wild that are used regular that require Xt.

That's the difference between "legacy" and "obsolete". Legacy software
still has some value due to historical (i.e. compatibility) reasons,
but wouldn't normally be considered if you were starting from a blank
slate. If absolutely nothing used it, it would be "obsolete".

> Besides XEmacs, regular Emacs (with X support), Gnu gv, Libreoffice,
> Sun/Oracle JDK (with X support), tk, Thunderbird, Imagemagick (with X
> support), Firefox, Seamonkey, Xscreensaver, Xterm amongst others all
> depends on Xt acc. to my 'equery depends x11-libs/libXt' on my Gentoo
> machine (not sure if all is runtime dependencies though). So it seems Xt
> is far from dead?

Firefox only uses Xt because it's specified by the Netscape plug-in
API, which dates back to when Netscape Navigator used Motif. It was
re-written using GTK shortly after it became Free software due to
Motif being non-Free and the free alternative (Lesstif) being
insufficiently robust.

Tk isn't linked against libXt, but it might need some files which are
part of the libXt package (Tk uses X resources, but does so by
manually parsing ~/.Xdefaults etc; it doesn't even use the Xrm*
functions from Xlib).

The ImageMagick libraries are linked against libXt, but don't appear
to use any symbols from it. It uses libdl, so it's possible that, like
Firefox, there are third-party plug-ins which depend upon Xt.

Many others are themselves bordering on legacy status (e.g. Gnome and
KDE each have their own terminal emulators).

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>