Re: octave gui & mingw

[Shai Ayal]

John,

Why don't you use a "ready-made" cvs/svn project server like
sourceforge or Savannah. It will provide you with all necessary
"bureaucratic" things like mailing lists, bug reports, feature
requests, cvs/svn, web page, download sites etc...

Shai

On 2/9/06, John Swensen <address@hidden> wrote:
> Sebastian,
>
> A couple of years ago (before I knew a lot about programming) I tried to
> use QT to implement a UI for octave.  Given that I was way less
> experienced, my problems may have been due to that.  I tried using the
> QProcess class and redirecting STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR to talk with an
> instance of Octave.  The problem lied in the fact that I couldn't get it
> to work right and it would inevitably hang because of some issue with
> how they read/write to the STD* channels.  I also had to reimplement a
> large portion of the same funtionality that readline already provides
> because the QT STD* redirection didn't handle arrow keys and such by
> default.  Needless to say, I switch to GTK and am using the VTE widget
> and haven't had a single hiccup.
>
> I have been working on an Octave GUI with GTK for about a year now, but
> with a day job, progress has been slow.  A friend is willing to host a a
> trac/subversion wiki for me but I haven't got everything checked in
> yet.  My implementation uses X, so it works fine on OSX, Linux, and
> Cygwin (runing Xwindows).  Now that cygwinports is up and running again,
> it is pretty trivial to get all the dependencies met.  There are native
> versions of GTK (e.g. used in Gimp) so I wouldn't necessarily count it
> out as an option.
>
> Regardless of which toolkit is chosen for the "standard" octave UI, I
> think the first step would be to design a good interface control
> document (ICD) that defines the data that is passed between the octave
> core and the UI.  A mechanism also needs built into the octave sources
> that provides a level of thread safety.  I did this by putting a hook
> into the main execution loop such that each time a command is not
> executing, variable information and command history are copied into a
> semaphore-protected buffer for retrieval by the UI at regular
> intervals.  With this hook in place, I ran the benchmark.m script from
> the sciviews.org web site and in ~200 seconds, the additional overhead
> was only ~200 ms.  I don't know if you were planning on compiling the UI
> in as part of the actual application, but my implementation uses sockets
> and seems to work quite well.  This interface needs to define things
> like (my current code only implements about half of these):
>   - Debugging information
>      - Signal when a breakpoint is hit
>      - Add/remove/modify breakpoints
>   - Variable information
>      - List of variables in scope
>      - Ability to request detailed variable information
>   - Command history information
>   - Others
>      - Comments????
>
>  Just my $0.02
>
>
> John Swensen
>
>
> Sebastien Loisel wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I'm probably going to write a GUI for octave using QT4 under MinGW.
> > David Bateman gracefully sent me a tarball to build under MinGW, and
> > suggested I announce my intention here because there are other octave
> > GUI projects.
> >
> > I've googled for octave IDE's, but I haven't found very many active
> > projects or projects that would run in Windows. If you are aware of
> > active IDE projects, let me know.
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Sébastien Loisel
> >
>
>