Re: looking ahead to 3.6

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 11 February 2011 14:16, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
> If possible, we need to make printing work even when a plot is not
> displayed on the screen.

I briefly studied this problem with OpenGL. It's going to be tricky.
First of all, at least on free systems, OpenGL requires X to be
available in order to access hardware acceleration. So offscreen
plotting over ssh will require for there to be a running X server
installed on the remote machine, which could limit the usefulness of
offscreen plotting. Even without that, the mangled mesa approach seems
to be the only available, and I still don't see a way to make that
work reliably unless we ship mesa with Octave.

This is from a cursory glance at the problem and brief discussions in
IRC. There might be other solutions I'm not aware of.

> Integrate a GUI with the core Octave distribution.

Wow. I never thought I would hear these words. What's next, tighter
integration between Octave and Octave-Forge, actually bless an attempt
to implement JIT, start a side project that looks something like
Simulink, listening to the Boeotians? ;-)

Ok, more seriously, I'm really glad that you've looked favourably upon
a GUI. I am a little concerned that GTK+ won't be the best option,
though, even if OctaveDE is just about the only one doing the right
thing. I think of projects like TortoiseHg (which by the way is an
awesome graphical frontend to hg, y'all should try it) which started
with GTK+, started experiencing cross-platform difficulties, and
switched to Qt. It seems to me that Qt provides the best
cross-platform graphical experience, but then again, OctaveDE's
developer seems to be a heavy Mac OS X user, and those guys tend to
have a respected sense of aesthetics.

> Maybe we should create a page on the wiki for these goals and ideas.

I thought I already had? Isn't this essentially what the PROJECTS file
is?

- Jordi G. H.