Re: GNU Octave has been accepted as a GSoC 2016 mentor organization

[Juan Pablo Carbajal]

On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 3:04 PM, John Swensen <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On Feb 29, 2016, at 12:37 PM, Nir Krakauer <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>
> Please let me know if you're interested in helping evaluate applications and
> then mentor any accepted students.
>
> Student applications will be due March 14-25, see
> https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com
>
> —Nir
>
>
> I haven’t been involved in Octave development a ton lately, but would like
> to get more involved now that I am past the grad student/postdoc days and
> got a faculty job. I have recently done some work with a couple of different
> polygon libraries and think that implementing many of the polygon functions
> (e.g. polybool, poly2ccw, poly2cw, poly2fv, polyjoin, polysplit, etc.) and
> would be something I could mentor.
>
> It looks like there is a partial implementation as MEX function (though not
> in Octave package format) at
> https://sites.google.com/site/ulfgri/numerical/polybool that uses both
> ClipperLib and GPC. I think GPC
> (http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~toby/gpc/#Licensing) is out of the question
> because of their "free for private/hobbyist/education and non-free for
> products/commercial" licensing. ClipperLib
> (http://www.angusj.com/delphi/clipper.php) used the Boost Software License.
> The Boost::Geometry (https://github.com/boostorg/geometry) and
> Boost::Polygon
> (http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_60_0/libs/polygon/doc/index.htm) libraries
> could also be used and are license-friendly.
>
> Unfortunately, based on my evaluation of all three of these, GPC is by far
> the most robust solution that can handle self intersections and nearly
> parallel lines very, very well, but is likely not license-compatible with
> Octave. ClipperLib is the easiest to use and Boost::Geometry is the most
> powerful (but a bit confusing because of how much templating is going on).
>
> Let me know if this sounds interesting and you want to add me to the list of
> potential mentors.
>
> John S.
>
John S.
It sounds like a good project. do you think it is possible to put it
as an improvement of the package geometry? There are some of the
functions already there, but as m-files, maybe we can .oct some of
those.

Also Philip Nienhuis had some ideas about the clipping library that I
haven't had time to test.