Re: QT Octave installation

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 14 February 2012 04:32, Ismael Núñez-Riboni <address@hidden> wrote:
> Why to make a new GUI from scratch considering there is already a
> lot of work behind QtOctave?

QtOctave's approach is fundamentally flawed, like most other efforts
to make an Octave GUI: it communicates with pipes. Look at the
terminal window, for instance. It has an input line and a display
line, but the two are loosely coupled. So, for example, the readline
abilities of Octave are partly reimplemented, but not completely.

However, the flaw runs deeper: it doesn't work with fltk plotting. Try
it: "graphics_toolkit fltk;" now try to plot something. QtOctave will
hang. Same with GUI Octave, same with Xoctave (and Octave workshop,
and YAOG, and all those other historical efforts). We need a tighter
coupling between Octave and its GUI, but no GUI author has wanted to
do that. They all think of the problem too simply. They think of
Octave as some foreign program and that communication is simply text
goes in, text comes out. Octave needs more interaction that, for
example, for being able to fully reproduce the interactive plots that
Matlab users come to expect.

The important parts of QtOctave have already been re-used in the
native GUI, in fact. QtOctave's author has already endorsed this
effort.

- Jordi G. H.