Re: Bug#638760: Removal of grace, pygrace and expeyes
On Sun, 2014-03-23 at 08:59 +0100, Jerome Kieffer wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Mar 2014 08:44:36 +0100
> Sylvestre Ledru <sylvestre@debian.org> wrote:
>
> > > Sounds like a worthy candidate for the Google Summer of Code.
> > >
> > Too late for the GSoC (deadline for students was last Friday) and I
> > don't think we would have
> > accepted this as a project.
>
> After having looked the conference of Dirk Hohndel on last
> linux.conf.au about the switch of his (together with Linus)
> application from GTK to Qt ... in a year
>
> This took them a year of work and they are much more skilled than most of us.
> Considering this could be done by a student over a summer is just unrealistic.
>
> Grace has its root in the late 80's it is C code (in which I am not
> especially fluent) Qt is C++ based. Moreover, Dirk noted some miss-fit
> of Qt with C ...
>
> So this is probably a great project but it will be difficult to
> motivate somebody skilled enough to do this work
Oh yeah, that's two separate projects.
In the short term, it would be useful to refactor grace to use freetype
for font management instead of t1lib. This amount of work is probably
about right for a GSoC kind of project. Might be a couple of weekends'
work for the proverbial skilled developer. That's the first project.
The second project is in the long term. It would be of immense benefit
to have a plotting package available which is written with a modern tool
set like Qt. This would want to be not be a refactoring or a simple gui
skin of the existing grace, but rather a complete rewrite, starting
again from scratch. You can understand why the original author is not
volunteering to do it, it's no small amount of work. It wouldn't even
have to "be" Grace as such, it's just that we need the functionality
that grace provides. If I had the time to do it, I'd probably call it
"Grace" (if the original author gave his blessing on it. Maybe
"Damnation" if he didn't) out of gratitude for all the good years of
service from the old Grace.
It could probably be successfully done in stages by a succession of
university students as part of their credited software engineering
projects.
Drew
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