OctaveDE in QT [was Re: looking ahead to 3.6]

[John Swensen]

On Feb 28, 2011, at 6:25 PM, John Swensen wrote:

> 
> On Feb 28, 2011, at 3:44 PM, Michael Goffioul wrote:
>> 
>> I gave it a try and could get an initial version of qtermwidget working
>> on Windows/MSVC (thankfully, Qt is MSVC-friendly). It's far from 
>> problem-free,
>> but it's a starting point.
>> 
>> Michael.
> 
> Michael,
> Thanks for taking a look at this.  I have been trying to hack on qtermwidget 
> so I could openpty and dup2 the STDOUT, STDIN, and STDERR file descriptors 
> and set the master side of the qtermwidget PTY, but am not having any luck.  
> That is how the current OctaveDE + VTE works, but doesn't seem to work with 
> qtermwidget.  I really don't understnad TTYs and PTYs very well, so I don't 
> understand while switching the master side of the PTY doesn't work.
> 
> Does anyone on the list understand PTYs well and could give me some insight?  
> The reason I want to do it this way is so the IDE and Octave run in the same 
> process space and thus the octave_server class doesn't have to do any fancy 
> IPC.
> 
> John Swensen
> 
> 

It took a bit of work, but I now have the most recent source for Konsole 
converted to be "KDE free".  The sources for qtermwidget made it a lot easier 
when there were steps I wasn't quite sure about.  I also modified the test 
program of the qtermwidget library to launch Octave and a thread inside the 
same program running the terminal.  At this point, Octave is running in a 
terminal emulator widget in the same memory space as the user interface (i.e. 
no crazy IPC to communicate with Octave internals).  I should be able to use 
the exact same octave_server class hooked into the readline idle loop that I 
used previously in OctaveDE/GTK+ and start implementing the panels for history, 
variables information, etc.

I think Michael is going to take a look at the Windows side of things, but I 
have a problem with it working on OSX.  I am not quite sure why.  The 
qtermwidget works fine on OSX and my version works fine if I don't use the 
openpty, dup2, set the PTY master for the Konsole widget, and then spawn 
octave_main() in a thread.  If any OSX gurus have a chance to look at this, it 
should compile fine with just a basic QT dev package installed and CMake.

http://swengames.com/misc/OctaveDE_QT_LinuxWorking.tgz

Anyone else who wants to take a gander is more than welcome, and any input is 
requested.

John Swensen


P.S. Sorry to those who got this email twice