Re: looking ahead to 3.6

[John Swensen]

On Feb 28, 2011, at 3:44 PM, Michael Goffioul wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 1:23 PM, John Swensen <address@hidden> wrote:
>> 
>> On Feb 14, 2011, at 4:40 AM, Michael Goffioul wrote:
>> 
>>> Additional comments:
>>> 1) The terminal emulation problem under Windows exists in *all*
>>> toolkits, as there's no pty concept Windows. Whatever the choice,
>>> you'll have to fake terminal through pipes under Windows. To achieve
>>> that, I hacked VTE a lot. But this can be re-done for any other
>>> toolkit.
>>> 2) Despite the terminal emulation problem, I'd still go that way in a
>>> GUI, as this would provide the most consistent interface bewteen a
>>> console version and a GUI (like having the same key bindings...). If
>>> you want real hard-core developers ever to use a GUI, that's the right
>>> choice to make. If you need better integration between readline and a
>>> GUI, I think it would be possible to modify readline to add suitable
>>> hooks.
>> 
>> Michael,
>> Since you already took a look at the Window PTY/pipes issue once for GTK+, 
>> would you be willing to take a look at the QT terminal widget at
>> http://qt-apps.org/content/show.php/QTermWidget?content=82832
>> ?
>> 
>> This was the work of a person who took Konsole and ripped out the terminal 
>> emulator portions to make it "KDE free".  I have been able to compile it on 
>> both Linux and OSX (???) and was wondering if you can assess how easy it 
>> would be to modify for use on Windows.  As a side note, some of the comments 
>> said it was also compilable on Solaris, so I assume any of the *NIX-y 
>> platforms would work without much modification. I tried to compile on 
>> Windows and it had problems with memory mapping functions, but I am sure 
>> that was probably just the tip of the iceberg (and I don't really know 
>> Windows programming).
> 
> I gave it a try and could get an initial version of qtermwidget working
> on Windows/MSVC (thankfully, Qt is MSVC-friendly). It's far from problem-free,
> but it's a starting point.
> 
> Michael.

Michael,
Thanks for taking a look at this.  I have been trying to hack on qtermwidget so 
I could openpty and dup2 the STDOUT, STDIN, and STDERR file descriptors and set 
the master side of the qtermwidget PTY, but am not having any luck.  That is 
how the current OctaveDE + VTE works, but doesn't seem to work with 
qtermwidget.  I really don't understnad TTYs and PTYs very well, so I don't 
understand while switching the master side of the PTY doesn't work.

Does anyone on the list understand PTYs well and could give me some insight?  
The reason I want to do it this way is so the IDE and Octave run in the same 
process space and thus the octave_server class doesn't have to do any fancy IPC.

John Swensen