[Kstars-devel] KStars & scripting

[Khudyakov Alexey]

Hello everyone.

Here is some thoughts about kstars scripting, rants, problems, possible 
solutions.


Lets start from ScriptBuider. It is a tool for building scripts from GUI. It 
doesn't support even conditionals and loops. Only sequencing of operations. 
I'd call this totally useless. Recent example of Yiannis Belias showed that it 
is case. He had to return to old trusty text editor.

Also Themis Oraiop found couple of bugs in builder. I think it support 
that it is deserted part of KStars no one really care about.


Kstars has option to execute scripts created by script builder without using 
external interpreter. It doesn't support conditionals and loops. And therefore 
completely useless tool too.


So far we have two useless components. What should we do with them. First I 
want to say that we are not in business of writing IDEs or interpreters. It 
better to use other tools to do all work.

Scripts are using D-bus to communicate with kstars. Therefore I propose to 
clean up current D-bus interface and document it. Latter part is most 
important. It's not possible to write scripts when interface is unknown.

After that both script builder should and code for script execution should be 
removed. They are maintenance burden.

Your opinions on the matter?

--
  Khudyakov Alexey