lesstif vs openMotif

[Jordan K. Hubbard]

On Jan 20, 2008, at 6:34 AM, Michael Franz wrote:

> While trying to configure IcedTea, I found that although lesstif is  
> a dependency, I was not able to get configure to be happy until I  
> installed openMotif.

You might want to file a bug report on that - looks like the IcedTea  
maintainer simply backed the wrong horse in the dependency list.

>  lesstif was missing things like Xm.h, Display.h.  Is one of these  
> more popular than another?  Does the Darwin/OS X world have a  
> preference for one?  Can the two ports be used interchangeably?

No.  Maybe.  No. :-)

Given that it's the original reference code base, openMotif clearly  
implements the API standard and is far more free to extend/change that  
API standard.  Lesstif is LGPL'd and doesn't have the poison-pill  
license (to commercial organizations, interestingly enough) that  
openMotif has, so others still have a reason to prefer it, even though  
it's always going to be playing catch-up (and not fully  
interchangeable).

- Jordan