[Kst] raw data access

[George Staikos]

On Monday 13 October 2003 10:32, Ted Kisner wrote:
> Greetings,
>   my name is Ted Kisner and I am a collaborator on the Boomerang
> experiment. We use kst for real time data display and post-acquisition
> viewing.  I have not used any of the newer versions of kst (I'm still using
> one compatible with kde 2.2.x on my debian machines).

   Things have changed quite a bit since then! :)

> I am guessing that kst still supports reading from "dirfile" format raw
> binary data.  I'm not sure if it still uses Barth's original getdata.h file
> for reading this data.

  It should still work, yes.

> I wanted to point out a library that I've created that is based on Barth's
> original code.  In addition to bug fixes, this library has the following
> features:

  This sounds interesting.  I will speak with Barth tomorrow about this.

> o  Reading and Writing to both RAW fields and derived fields (LINTERP,
> LINCOM and BIT).

  This is most important.  We need to coordinate this code and make sure we 
don't end up with features and fixes spread out across various versions (ie. 
we need to reduce the forks of this code).

> o  Automatic endian swapping when reading and writing data files on
> big-endian machines

  I believe we already have this as I am developing Kst on both big endian and 
little endian machines.

> o  Large file support

  This sounds rather important. :)

> you can download the library here
>
> http://cmb.phys.cwru.edu/kisner/code/dirfile/
>
> it is my hope that this library could be useful to the kst project.  Here
> are some questions I have.
>
> 1.  how is the current raw data access integrated into kst (is it a
> plugin?)

  Not yet, but it may change to work this way.  We will be discussing this 
tomorrow.

> 2.  I believe that using this library instead of the builtin code is simply
> a matter of changing a couple function calls.  Is it worth making a patch
> for this, or should someone more familiar with the code base "just do it"?

  I can do that when the time comes.  Is your code licensed GPL or LGPL 
compatible?

-- 
George Staikos
KDE Developer				http://www.kde.org/
Staikos Computing Services Inc.		http://www.staikos.net/