[kde-edu]: forwarded message from Lalescu Liviu

[Dominique Devriese]

Dominique Devriese writes:

  Lalescu> The program is designed to automatically process a set of
  Lalescu> teacher-subject-set of students activities (input) and to
  Lalescu> output a suitable timetable (only hour allocation for
  Lalescu> now, no rooms allocation, but this is a minor problem,
  Lalescu> not so important and easy to solve). The program also
  Lalescu> allows for some restrictions to be input by the user, for
  Lalescu> example that a certain teacher is not available in a
  Lalescu> period.

  Lalescu> Yes, the program needs much work to be finished. I am
  Lalescu> open to any suggestions. I don't want to impose Qt, I
  Lalescu> just want a universal easy to understand GUI programming
  Lalescu> (I thought free Qt was recommendable).

Well, the problem is that KDE-Edu as a subproject likes to have its
applications properly integrated with KDE, and this means using the
KDE libraries, I think.  Qt libraries on windows are being
discontinued on windows for Qt 3.* anyway, so if you want to stay
Qt-only for that reason, I guess it's not really going to stay that
way..
Regarding the GUI, I'd suggest to split the window up into a single
main window, and some dialogs to let the user input more specialized
things..  The window is much too large to be manageable for a user, I
think..  Maybe you could make it more intuitive by using a Wizard,
which orders the steps a user needs to take for generating a
timetable.  Or perhaps split up the various things into different tabs
or subdialogs, it's up to what you like, I guess :)

  Lalescu> All I want is to make this program widely available and
  Lalescu> to have a team of interested people working on it. I am
  Lalescu> not sure if I can be an active maintainer. I will work on
  Lalescu> it in the future if I will have the time to. But maybe
  Lalescu> other people will work on it more than me in the future.

The problem is that there are lots of interesting things to be done
for KDE-Edu, but that we ( the KDE-Edu team ) are with a bit too few
to do it all..  That's why I was asking if you would be willing to
actively maintain your program..  The main advantages of having your
program included into KDE-Edu, I think, are the increased exposure and
the communication with the rest of the team.  Getting people to help
with your program is rather hard, since most capable people already
have a lot to do..

  Lalescu> The program uses a genetic algorithm (evolutionary
  Lalescu> program). I cannot do a comparison with some other
  Lalescu> programs, because I never had the time to enter a real
  Lalescu> timetabling information (from a faculty or high
  Lalescu> school). I hope someone will want to do that in the
  Lalescu> future. But, with very difficult randomly chosen data,
  Lalescu> the program seems to be generating very good timetables,
  Lalescu> very fast. I have made a random dataset containing 70
  Lalescu> teachers, 80 subgroups of students and 500 activities
  Lalescu> (lectures), with about 70% hours occupied from 60 per
  Lalescu> week for the students. It produces a valid timetable in
  Lalescu> about 10 minutes or less on my 1700+ Athlon.

Seems like you've done a good job there :-)
cheers
domi

-- 
He jests at scars who never felt a wound.
		-- Shakespeare, "Romeo and Juliet, II. 2"