Re: Release plans for the GUI

[Jacob Dawid]

Hello everybody,

I just came back from the funeral of my grandfather, so I had no time to reply earlier.

The biggest problem with the GUI is the terminal thing. The reason I threw out Konsole is that it's drawing itself, which is not a performance issue but it breaks the overall look and feel of the application and is quite buggy when losing and gaining focus (sometimes it did not redraw, sometimes it did). Also, the solution to use a terminal emulation is ugly and can only be a temporary one. We just use it because we have no other option that works left over at the moment.

So we have two goals, a short-term goal and a long-term goal.

Short-term: Make it work on all platforms with the terminal emulation, treating Windows differently, as Michael already said. Probably we can't come up with a Windows terminal emulation in case no one wants to contribute here.

Long-term: Tweak octave so we can connect directly to it. We are already starting octave in the same process (we call octave_main(..) in a separate (software) thread), so we are sharing memory with octave. We don't need any pipes and no platform-selective terminal emulation here.

I tried to compile the GUI on Windows, which is not a problem as far as concerning the GUI. What failed was mingw that apparently did not find the octave headers though they were at the location I specified them.

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