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

[Akarsh Simha]

Hello

> I would definitely like to see KStars in Google CodeIn.

Wow! Thanks for sharing my interests!

> > 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 ?).

Yes. I think that's a good idea, for a 1 ~ 1.5 or even 2 week task. We
can say we specifically request for certain articles.

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

That's a very good idea too. I guess Jasem would have very interesting
inputs here?

> > 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.

Yes, I realise it is too much -- particularly because it is run partly
during school time and during vacation season.

> > 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.

Yes. This would be a good idea as well. I'd like to learn about it by
watching some code getting in :)

> 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.

Hmm, yes. Maybe we could work together some time during a weekend and
learn it?

Thanks for your support, Victor!

Regards
Akarsh