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

[Zoltan Padrah]

It seems that this email has not made it to the list, so I'm forwarding it.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Pablo Daniel Pareja Obregon <parejaobregon  () gmail.com>
Date: 2011/4/8
Subject: Re: Summary of latest IRC discussions about KTechLab


Hi all,

My name is Pablo, and I am the current maintainer of Caneda. From the start we
were a very small group of developers and due to new jobs, family, etc,
currently I'm pretty much the only one active developer left ( by now :) ).

Anyway, last months I've not been very productive on Caneda either (as I'm on
the last year of my thesis), but I intend to keep on working on it and I am
interested in cross interaction with other EDA suites.

As you mentioned, our gui is based on Qt, so interacting with your simulator
shouldn't be difficult. In fact, the idea from the start was to create a simple
to use front-end that could run several existing simulators as back-ends. This
way, the user could choose between qucs/ngspice/ktechlab from the settings
dialog according to their needs.

Currently I am working on a wire engine rewrite, that I think feels more
intuitive to the user. As soon as I finish, I was going to move to the export
netlist and simulation part using some existing simulator (for example yours).
We could interact here, or on a whole application level (as you prefer). The
plot system is on the works in a personal branch, and is achieved using the
qwt plot library.

As a far future idea, I think a close interaction between file formats would be
a nice idea to work on. This work should involve as much EDA softwares as
posible, trying to generate some kind of ODF specification, but aimed at
electronics. This would allow the user to create for example a schematic in
one suite and open it on any other suite without much effort.

What were your ideas for cooperation? Any suggestions or comments are
welcome...

Regards,
Pablo

On Domingo 03 Abril 2011 17:14:09 Zoltan Padrah escribió:
>    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

--
Ing. Pablo Daniel Pareja Obregón

CONICET - Universidad Nacional del Sur
Departamento de Ingeniería Eléctrica y de Computadoras
Avda Alem Nº 1253 - Bahía Blanca (8000)
Argentina

Te: +54 0291 4595100 int 3350
    +549 0291 15 4259045