Subject: Toolkit for X and News

From: [email-masked] (Mark Steven Sherman)
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 87 20:40:39 EST

We're very eager to let you see it. But we are more eager to get it shaken
down and documented for a December X tape than to have earlier versions hit
the streets.

However, a couple technical comments in response to your question.

1) Same binaries. Well, yes and no. We use an object-oriented system that can
dynamically load in objects. The interaction manager object and graphics
object provide an interface that is implemented by your favorite system. We
dynamcially load in the window manager subclass of choice. So yes, the "real"
objects and system support libraries are the same binaries, but somewhere
underneath, a different object was loaded for different window systems. (I
personally run both Andrew and X on the same machine but on different
screens. The same Andrew Toolkit (nee BE2) programs on both displays share
the same program segment and so don't really take a lot of room.)

2) BE2 and the Andrew user-interface are similar but distinct. For example,
the idea of a tiling window manager is Andrew-like but unrelated to the
Andrew Toolkit. To the best of knowledge, there will also be a window manager
called cwm in the Andrew Toolkit that does provide an Andrew-like
environment, e.g., tiling windows. However, I have run Andrew Toolkit
applications under wm and uwm, and I have run other X applications under cwm
(fish is particularly good for providing a load).

Some aspects of "Andrew" are provided by the Andrew Toolkit, e.g.,
interpretation of left button and right button for scrolling, and these
should look the same under all reasonable implementations of the interaction
manager. We can't stop anyone from rewriting the im object to interpret a
capital A as a left mouse click, but you are sure to confuse users. I would
hope that anyone porting the Andrew Toolkit to NeWS would follow the spirit
of the system, and when it is told to post menus, it would call the
"standard" menu system in lite (or whatever). We know that X is all mechanism
and no policy, so we have to do some work ourselves.

			-Mark