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Re: RFS: QtOctave -- A Qt front-end to Octave


From: Rafa Rodriguez Galvan
Subject: Re: RFS: QtOctave -- A Qt front-end to Octave
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 11:01:19 +0200
User-agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.13 (X11/20070824)

Hi Nicolas:


Btw, my packaging has already been accepted into Debian:

     http://packages.debian.org/sid/qtoctave

and I'm fairly certain it will be included in Ubuntu's Gutsy Gibbon,
depending on when Ubuntu grabbed the unstable Debian snapshot.

Thanks for your work. I just was trying to suggest you using the Debian
Octave Group environment (alioth project, svn for the sources, web, etc)
in order to maintain yor package. But, of course, you can do it in the
way you prefer.

On 16/09/2007, Nicolas Pettiaux <address@hidden> wrote:
I am back working on octave and trying to use qtoctave for the
numerical analysis course that I am teaching.

I fully agree with your comments below. In the university where I work
(Cadiz University, Spain), some teachers are planning to use octave
in the classroom and qtOctave is the solution for that. The problem is
that qtOctave is not yet as stable as we would like. Anyway, Pedro Lucas
is doing a great job and I hope that he (and Alejandro Alvarez and the other upstream developers of qtOctave) will try to stabilize it in a
not far future.

On the other hand, I'm a fan of Emacs and it's my preferend environment
for octave. The problem is that it's not easy to recommend it to
teachers that that they are accustomed to use proprietary tools from the
Windows world. Thats a big obstacle for the wide using of octave (that's
the situation in my university) and, in this context, an hypotetic sable
version of qtOctave would be very important.


I am not sure I think this is a good idea at this stage. QtOctave is
hardly what I would call stable. It is still very buggy software, as
you note yourself elsewhere.

I happen to be co-teaching a numerical analysis course too. The kids
seem content enough with Emacs and Octave, once they got used to the
whole "Linux" thing. I gave them the option to try out vim too, since
I didn't think it was fair to impose my own religious beliefs on them,
but they saw me use Emacs and haven't even tried vim yet, about which
I have mixed feelings. One the one hand, yay! Emacs, but on the other,
monoculture is usually a bad thing.

My point is this: using Emacs isn't as scary as it seems, and complete
novices can get comfortable with it. I admit I customised it slightly
for them by providing .emacs files that at least recognised the mouse
wheel and highlighted syntax by default, amongst other relatively
minor cosmetic enhancements. Like I said, they seem happy with this
option. It would be nice if we could eventually offer novices
QtOctave, but I think we're still far from that goal.

Is there any dedicated mailing list related to qtoctave developpement
or qtoctave usage to which I could subscribe ?

Not yet. It looks like QtOctave currently is simply me and Pedro
Lucas, the upstream developer and a few scattered users. I have a
rather hectic schedule right now, with an MSc thesis that I must hand
in before the end of September (!!), so I really should be
concentrating immediately on that now. I am hoping that by the end of
October or early November, I'll have more time to dedicate to QtOctave
and other sidequests of mine.

Is there a wiki related to qtoctave where I could contribute ?

Not yet.

Wouldn't be adequate that such a wiki be included in the official
octave wiki to support the combined usage and developpement ?

Yes. We should contact jwe or D. Bateman or whoever about
incorporating a QtOctave wiki with the other Octave projects.

Unfortunately, I do not (yet) speak, and even read spanish so I can
hardly contribute, as a simple / advance user to the doc. But I am
ready, as I plan to use qtoctave, to help with my students in the
course of the year if I can.

The documentation is a problem right now, but I think the usability of
QtOctave is right now even worse. For example, known bug: it segfaults
when you close all of the open windows inside QtOctave. I did a stack
trace in gdb, but it looks like the segfault comes from the bowels of
Qt itself, and I'm still not comfortable enough with Qt to debug this
correctly.

A much bigger problem was addressed in the following thread in the
Octave developers' list:

     
http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A-How-to-launch-Octave-with-its-GUI---tf4203354.html#a11957592

I think this should be our priority right now for QtOctave: proper
integration with Octave.

Cheers,
- Jordi G. H.



--
J. Rafael Rodríguez Galván
Director de la Oficina de Software Libre de la Universidad de Cádiz (OSLUCA)
Aulario Simón Bolívar, Glorieta Simón Bolívar S/N. 11002 (Cádiz).
Tlfn. 956 01 5121


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