Re: GUI work (was: Graphical help browser)

[Abdelrazak Younes]

Soren Hauberg wrote:
> tir, 25 11 2008 kl. 13:58 -0600, skrev Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso:
> >     1) Completely free and cross platform. I understand compiling Qt
> >     on Windows with MinGW is trivial, whereas GTK+ is more of a
> >     challenge, but correct me if I'm wrong.
>
> I'm under the impression that gtk works easily with mingw, but I haven't
> used windows in a decade, so I'm as far from being an expert as
> possible. But see http://live.gnome.org/gtkmm/MSWindows for details.

FYI, Mingw development is a pita (i.e. slow as hell). MSVC2008 is a very 
fast and standard compliant compiler and a nice IDE. Last time I tried 
GTK was not compliable with MSVC. Qt of course is.

> >     4) Big players prefer it, so I am guessing they have good reasons
> >     for it.
>
> Really? I was under the impression that Qt is mostly used in embedded
> applications. But hey, I don't really know...

Hey, you obviously don't :-)
FYI all of KDE is Qt, LyX is Qt and some cross-platform commercial apps 
are Qt too (Skype, Google earth, etc).

> > Of course, these are very subjective reasons... but in the grand
> > tradition of past holy wars like Emacs vs vim and Gnome vs KDE (of
> > which this present jihad feels like an offshoot), subjectivity is all
> > we have.
>
> Yay, we can a flame-war :-)

Hope I didn't disappoint you :-)

That being said, QtOctave seems pretty stalled to me. I sent a patch to 
the devel list some weeks ago but never got any answer...
So if the GTK GUI is in active development, that is the best option you 
have right now IMHO. In any case, if I had a say in Octave development I 
would strongly recommend to concentrate on one frontend instead wasting 
your precious and scarce development resource with multiple frontends. 
We had very bad experience in LyX development and I would be sad that 
Octave repeat the same errors that we made.

Good luck,
Abdel.