[Kstars-devel] Re: KStars in Google Code-In?

[Victor Carbune]

Hello,

I would definitely like to see KStars in Google CodeIn.


> One of the things that could really use some creative young people,
> IMO, is to make KStars more educative and beginner-friendly. John
> Tapsell met Prakash and me at Akademy 2010 and pointed out that KStars
> was really not very beginner friendly. I had not thought of this
> myself. Maybe that's a good thing to work on next.
I also think this is a good starting point.

What is the current status of the old AstroInfo project [1] ?
I think a task could be to add new definitions and describe how they
appear within KStars (and revive the AstroInfo project itself ?).

Another idea would be a PDF guide for teachers who want to use KStars
in a classroom at school or astronomy club.

> If we get smarter students, we could try and make Cartes du Ciel
> catalogs compatible with KStars. Talking to users, I realise that our
> small datasets are a hindrance. But that may not be something that a
> student will really enjoy working on, or will have creative inputs on.
I would leave this as a task, marked as hard (not sure how many 13 -
18 students have a vast programming experience).
This is also related to my gsoc work and maybe using the database will
make things easier.

> Any ideas?
What about setting up testing within KStars? Unit testing, for
example. As of my knowledge, our codebase currently lacks of testing.
Whenever we get a new feature, we can make sure this way that things
don't break.
Ideally however, this task would be for a student to write several
unit tests, and I think this requires work from us first, on actually
setting up testing and writing some examples using the Qt and KDE
frameworks for testing.

Victor

[1] http://docs.kde.org/stable/en/kdeedu/kstars/astroinfo.html