[sldev] New Viewer Shell Proposal

[Argent Stonecutter]

> While SL isn't nearly that bad, the point still stands, I think:  
> People
> working full time on widgets figured long ago which things really
> sucked, and got rid of them.

Roger that. It's also better to use native OS widgets because they  
automatically interoperate in platform-specific ways (such as  
supporting services under OS X), and Qt widgets aren't native. And  
Qt's licensing is not particularly friendly... there are alternatives  
with much more liberal licenses already available, such as Tk (which  
is basically BSD licensed an also comes with bindings for about every  
major scripting language out there) and wxWidgets (which is  
comparable to the LGPL and really does use native widgets under the  
hood).

SL already has a widget *framework*, plus an implementation based on  
this framework. Implementing that framework in one of these other  
alternative APIs (or even in Cocoa and Win32 widgets directly...  
carefully written Cocoa code will work on Linux using GNUstep)  
doesn't seem like an unreasonable goal... but of all of the  
alternatives I don't see why Qt should even be shortlisted.