[Ktechlab-devel] Summary of latest IRC discussions about KTechLab

[Zoltan Padrah]

   Hello,

in this email I'm summarizing the discussions on IRC, related to ktechlab.  
( #ktechlab on freenode.net)

The topics discussed were the following:
- kdevplatform API stability
- merging the simulator and master branches
- asking about possible cooperation with the Caneda project

I'm starting to detail the last item, as it might be more interesting for  
many people.

Julian mentioned about the Caneda project (  
http://sourceforge.net/projects/caneda/ ). As I've understood, they are  
also trying to simulate circuits. Their gui is also based on Qt, just as  
ktechlab. By a quick look at the source code, i haven't found a simulator  
in their codebase, so they might be interested in reusing ktechlab's  
simulator. Because both caneda, and the simulator core depends only on Qt,  
technically integrating the two should be quite simple.

I'm sending this email also to the project admin of Caneda.



Next item: merging the simulator and the master branches

It is useful to have all the codebase in the same tree, so it can be more  
easily managed. Merging is not that trivial, as the source code for the  
simulator has been re-imported to my simulator branch again, so if we want  
to keep the git history, we need to fix the conflicts during merging. A  
simpler solution would be to move all the simulator tree in a new  
directory, rebase all the commits on that, and then merging should be  
trivial. After having everything in the same tree, we can reorganize all  
the source code.

This needs some experimentation with git. Any tips are welcome.



Finally: ktechplatform API stability

I've tried to compile Julian's master branch, but I got compile errors.  
The reason has been found as the different kdevplatform versions: he uses  
version 1.2 and I have 1.0. It seems that there is no backwards  
compatibility on the used APIs. This means that having a separate GUI from  
the simulator core it really the way to go, as we will have less  
version-dependent code in the project.

In order to work around the version mismatch problem, we agreed to have  
conditional compilation of code for various kdevplatform versions. This is  
feasibly because it is relatively little code affected by the API changes.  
Also the .desktop files for plugins need to be adjusted for different  
kdevlpatform versions.

After fixing the compilation errors, ktechlab still doesn't work on my  
computer. By some strange reason, It doesn't load the component plugins.  
More investigation is needed.



As conclusion, the following tasks are work in progress:
- merging the simulator branch to master branch
- compiling the same code for different kdevplatform versions


Regards,

  Zoltan