Problems with QtOctave

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 1 September 2010 16:06, David Grundberg <address@hidden> wrote:
>> I have used QtOctave and I admire those trying to develop it but I
>> encountered many bugs (I have posted here before to explore whether the bugs
>> lay with QtOctave or Octave). Personally, I would not recommend it at its
>> current stage of development.
>>
>
> I tried it three years ago and made the same conclusion then, I'm sorry
> to say.  The big problem I had with it was how it was just piping data
> from/to Octave.

When QtOctave was first announced and discussed, this problem was
brought up. The octave_server class in OctaveDE was written as an
alternative, and I do believe some patches into Octave proper were
accepted in order to make the octave_server class work (I may be
misremembering here).

It's a pity, because Qt is visually nicer than GTK+ on nonfree
systems, and that visual niceness gives people warm fuzzy feelings
about Octave. This is mostly why I maintain QtOctave for Debian, even
if I don't use it myself.

The QtOctave original developer has expressed that he's very busy
right now, so if we want to fix it, it's up to us. As far as I can
tell, QtOctave's own mailing lists[1] are almost dead. I submitted a
patch for a minor bug maybe a couple of weeks ago to the original
developer, and was ignored. It's going to go the way of Octave
Workshop and all the other countless abandoned Octave "GUI"s. It would
be good if a GUI could work well enough for Octave for it to be
officially endorsed. The white on black terminal window that users of
nonfree systems associate with an operating system of the past century
gives Octave some bad publicity.

I'm thinking, it might be time to fork? QtOctave isn't bad, and as far
as the Qt programming is concerned, it's good. It's just the "Octave"
in QtOctave that needs more work.

- Jordi G. H.

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/qtoctave-english and
http://groups.google.com/group/qtoctave-espanol