Re: Successfully merged projects

[Michael Goffioul]

2011/4/11 Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <address@hidden>:
> As I was telling Jacob earlier today in IRC, I don't think it's too
> early to start thinking about how to place this in the Octave source
> tree (perhaps under a gui/ directory from the top), in particular with
> regards to the VCS (hg) and the build system. We should figure out
> how to tie it in with autotools and decide how it should be built,
> whether to stay with qmake, or use CMake, or autotools itself, but I
> expect building Qt with autotools will be quite a challenge,
> considering KDE's decision a while ago to migrate from it to CMake.
>
> In fact, it's probably a good idea to think about this earlier rather
> than later. As the project grows, it is likely to get more and more
> tied to whatever build system you've chosen, so that if we ever decide
> we need a different one, the switch will be more difficult to make.
> Remember that portability is an important goal, so it should be
> possible to "easily" build on as many platforms as autotools supports.

Believe it or not, but imo qmake is probably more portable than autotools
to other platforms/compilers. Qmake is made by Qt to build Qt applications.
I think it makes perfect sense to use it to develop a Qt-based GUI.
The Qt library itself abstract most of the OS differences, so as long as
you're using Qt classes, you don't actually need any configure script.

For instance, the code should make use of QThread/QMutex instead of
using the lower level pthread library. That way, you're automatically
cross-platform.

Also I don't think it's necessary to put the GUI source code as a subdir
of the main octave source tree. I'd consider it as a separate project, but
it can of course be put under VCS at the same level as octave.

Michael.