Re: About porting to Qt.

[Peter Wainwright]

On Fri, 2008-05-02 at 20:05 +0200, jose maria gomez wrote:
> Peter, you cant imagine how happy I have became reading your email. First of 
> all, I would like to clear that I though that DDD project was died becuase 
> DDD was looking for a new maintainer since 2008/03/03. However it seems that 
> you were working on it, and not only that, but also you have done a very good 
> work. 
> I was thinking about to decouple it as well, but it seems you have done it 
> already.
> My idea was to put Qt over it, but as you can say we could have the same core 
> with different GUIs. We could work together. 

Thank you, that is what I was hoping for.

> 
> I dont know anything about gtkmm so I cant not help you a lot with this, but 
> we could work together in the Core and doing some GUI hacking for ourselves 
> (Qt and Qtkmm)
> 
> I am going to read and read your email again to go into details but I wanted 
> to write this proposal to you as soon as possible.
> 
> I fell very happy with your so important contribution.

(blushes)

> 
> One othe question, why havent you applied to be the official maintainer if 
> you 
> were working on it already?

Well, my contribution so far has been intermittent.  I first proposed
the GTK port almost 2 years ago, but it lapsed for want of time.
However, for the last several months I have been coding like mad.

In other words, I don't feel like taking up a position which requires
continuous attention.  I work on DDD when I feel like it (and have the
time), and other projects at other times.

I should clarify that my day job involves computational electromagnetics
modelling on a small Beowulf cluster, but I'm not paid to do programming
full time (let alone open source).  So I do it as and when...  I don't
think I will be able to touch DDD again until mid-May, but after that
I'll have another go.

Meantime, here's another screenshot. I just got the "GDB Settings"
dialog more or less working...

http://www.ceiriog.eclipse.co.uk/gddd-under-construction.png

> 
> 
> 
> On Friday 02 May 2008 05:36:36 pm Peter Wainwright wrote:
> > On Thu, 2008-05-01 at 15:19 +0200, jose maria gomez wrote:
> > > Hello, I am Jose Maria, the new offcial maintainer of DDD package. I a
> > > still having a look to the source and thinking about what could be the
> > > betters plans for DDD and which could be the better way to do it.
> > >
> > > One of the things I would like to do is to port DDD to Qt gui libraries.
> > > Anyway, this is not trivial. First of all, DDD need a lot of work to
> > > decouple GUI from "logic".
> >
> > Good news that someone has volunteered to replace Andrew.
> >
> > I don't know if you are aware, but I have already started a project to
> > write a new GUI backend which can use the Gtkmm widget set.  This is in
> > the "branches/gddd" directory of the Subversion repository.
> >
> > As a result I have already decoupled most of the logic from the backend
> > widget set.  All the communication goes through a shim or "virtual"
> > widget set (GUI::Widget, GUI::Container, GUI::Button...).
> >
> > You may find that you can just write another backend for this interface.
> > Otherwise, I hope that the interface can be easily modified to support
> > both Qt and Gtkmm, as well as maybe others yet to be invented.  I did
> > hope that my interface would support more widget sets than just Gtkmm,
> > but I didn't have enough experience of Qt to try writing anything using
> > Qt.
> >
> > Basically you would have a "QtX::" widget which would just be a
> > container for the real Qt widget.  The callbacks need to appear in the
> > main program as libsigc++ signals, which are similar to but not
> > identical to Qt signals.  I should think it is quite possible (maybe
> > even fairly easy) to catch Qt signals and translate them to the libsigc
> > ++ format.  I did the same for the Motif (Xt) callbacks, in order to
> > provide a backward-compatible version which would run on Motif.  I'm no
> > longer actively developing that code, but it worked quite well as far as
> > it went.
> >
> > I posted some ideas at http://www.ceiriog.eclipse.co.uk/ddd-gtk.pdf
> >
> > Peter Wainwright (pwainwright at users.sourceforge.net)
> >
> > > I will inform all of you as soon as posible about the plans. Everybody
> > > can help of course and your feedback is very important.
> > >
> > > The application is in C, so i would like to rewrite most of them to
> > > moderm C++ and put QT over all. At the same time I think that a good
> > > pluggin system could be really useful in this case.
> > >
> > > Thanks a lot.
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Ddd mailing list
> > > address@hidden
> > > http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/ddd
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Ddd mailing list
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> > http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/ddd
> 
> 
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