[Pkg-octave-devel] RFS: QtOctave -- A Qt front-end to Octave

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

Cleaning up the cc: list a little... I don't think the Debian mentors
have to hear about the issues that Nicolas brought up. :-)

> 2007/6/21, Rafa Rodriguez Galván <rafael.rodriguez at uca.es>:
> > We had between our plans the idea of making a Debian package for
> > qtOctave,

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.

On 16/09/2007, Nicolas Pettiaux <nicolas.pettiaux at ael.be> wrote:
> I am back working on octave and trying to use qtoctave for the
> numerical analysis course that I am teaching.

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.