[Kstars-devel] Collaboration between KStars and Stellarium

[Akarsh Simha]

Dear Friends from the Stellarium Team,

We are the KStars Team [http://edu.kde.org/kstars], and we write this
to you with a vision of some sort of collaboration between Stellarium
and KStars as initiated by Stellarium's Fabien Chéreau in a mail to
one of our colleagues.

We think a collaboration would be mutually beneficial and could be
carried out at several levels. The first collaboration that we have
been able to picturize immediately is in terms of sharing of
data. This would have several advantages. Our users would not have to
install twice a similar dataset if they use both softwares. We would
take advantage of any improvement in the dataset without having to do
the work twice.

External contributors would be able to contribute new data to both
softwares simultaneously. If you agree in such a common dataset we can
then discuss what are the needs of stellarium and kstars.

We could also envision some code sharing. Indeed, right now our code
bases are largely different.  Maybe we can think of an astrolib - a
common library using C++ / Qt + eigen2[1] / quaternions to implement
much of the math that KStars / Stellarium uses - in the near future.

We have already, so to speak, started collaborating after Jérôme
Sonrier brought in Stellarium's Sky Culture data into KStars.  We
would like to hear more suggestions regarding ways to collaborate from
your team. Maybe we should have a common mailing list to discuss such
stuff?

With Regards,
The KStars Team

[1] Eigen2 is a simple
(http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=API_Showcase) math
template library performing automatic vectorisation whenever possible.
Celestial mechanics can tremdendously benefit from vectorisation and
the library seem to be efficient:
http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php?title=Benchmark . The eigen lead
developer told he could help us using it if necessary.