>>> It's not outdated since it's actively maintained. I agree that it
>>> isn't eye-candy at all. But I would say it's easier to program than
>>> ncurses. It has a loot of widgets. The advantage of ncurses is obviously
>>> that it can run without X, therefore on very small systems; I wouldn't
>>> say it's the simplicity of programming.

By "outdated" I actually mean the technology behind.
It can be lightweight but still supports less features
than gtk+2 (which is by the way easy as well).
I can't really imagine something written with
Motif or XForms these days while curses is quite
popular. While XForms is alive I can add that CDE is
alive too, but who still uses it. I mean, we have
pretty much everything written on gtk+3
(with some gtk+2 exceptions that are becoming
rare), qt and curses.

And why actually there is no package for it in repository?
While we have around 30,000 apps (and 50,000 binaries)
in Sid, I think there is a place for both XForms and CDE,
assuming they are both fully open-sourced now.
Maybe they will be a bit more popular then.

My two cents,

Mitt