Re: Deprecating FLTK toolkit

[Rik]

On 11/07/2017 04:12 PM, address@hidden wrote:

Subject:

Deprecate fltk graphics toolkit?

From:

"John W. Eaton" <address@hidden>

Date:

11/07/2017 02:49 PM

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Octave Maintainers List <address@hidden>

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As I understand it, there are some issues with starting Qt graphics when running in non-gui mode, and that the fltk graphics toolkit does not have those problems.  But if we could fix that, and make the Qt plot window work when running in --no-gui mode, could we deprecate the fltk graphics toolkit?

That would be the first step.  There are also performance issues.  Linking in the Qt libraries seems to slow things down.

It seems wasteful to have to maintain both Qt and fltk graphics.  For example, I just made a change for the "Save" and "Save As" menu items in the Qt graphics code.  This change took much longer than it should have when I remembered that the change would also need to be made in the fltk graphics code and that needed to be done in a completely different way.

Conceptually, since there are a limited number of Octave contributors, it would be better to focus our meager efforts on a smaller number of lines of code to maintain.  Using that same argument, we should also get rid of the gnuplot interface.

In practice, there's probably a lot of code that would need to be written just to get rid of FLTK.  In addition to the non-GUI code, and resolving performance issues, there are functional issues as well.  The menus on the figures are supposed to be uimenu objects.  They are uimenu objects in the FLTK toolkit, but not yet for Qt.

--Rik