Re: GUI work (was: Graphical help browser)

[John Swensen]

On Nov 27, 2008, at 8:49 AM, Abdelrazak Younes wrote:
> Hope I didn't disappoint you :-)
>
> That being said, QtOctave seems pretty stalled to me. I sent a patch  
> to the devel list some weeks ago but never got any answer...
> So if the GTK GUI is in active development, that is the best option  
> you have right now IMHO. In any case, if I had a say in Octave  
> development I would strongly recommend to concentrate on one  
> frontend instead wasting your precious and scarce development  
> resource with multiple frontends. We had very bad experience in LyX  
> development and I would be sad that Octave repeat the same errors  
> that we made.
>
> Good luck,
> Abdel.

Well, I think we can close this thread up without having come to any  
real conclusions :-)  I had said that I was open to changing toolkits  
if the argument was strong enough, but so far I have not been  
convinced.  In fact, it seems that the only arguments for either side  
changing toolkits are as follows:
1) GTK already has a complete terminal emulator widget.
2) QT (with its commercial backing) seems to have "more" validation on  
the Windows and OSX platforms, although I must say the Gimp has been  
native on Windows for a long time and the folks at Imendio.com have  
really done great work getting GTK+ to work well and natively on OSX  
(see screenshots at http://developer.imendio.com/sites/developer.imendio.com/files/screenshot-gimp.png 
 and http://developer.imendio.com/sites/developer.imendio.com/files/screenshot-gossip.png) 
.

It seems that both OctaveDE and QtOctave are at about the same level  
feature-wise. As to OctaveDE not being stalled, that might not be an  
accurate statement.  I usually end up finding about 1-2 hours a week  
plus responding to emails, with an occasionally weekend (every 1-2  
months) where I make a big 20 hour push.  So, depending on your  
definition of stalled, OctaveDE might be considered stalled also.

The nice thing about an IDE is that it is not the biggest part of  
Octave development.  It is really just an alternate front-end.  I  
registered the OctaveDE project with Sourceforge back in August 2006.   
Since then, very few changes to OctaveDE have been caused by changes  
in Octave.  This means that the interface to Octave has stayed  
constant for over 2 years (with the exception of small changes in the  
symbol table interface).  What I hope this means is that once I get  
"done" with the IDE, there will me a small amount of maintenance and  
that I can focus my attention on other parts of Octave proper.

John Swensen