[Rkward-devel] Contributions/Tips

[thomas]

Hi!

> have you looked the new (standard) plugin system offered with kde3.1?

Admittedly, I have not yet, but probably I was also talking about something 
slightly different.
My "plugins" are XML-files, that basically describe on a rather high level, 
what the GUI for e.g. the t-test should look like, and how the settings made 
in the GUI should be translated into R-code. Additionally, these XML-files 
will one day contain help (or pointers to help) on how to actually use this 
statistical function.
You may want to have a look at the plugin-dir in the RKWard-sources and there 
esp. at the file 50.50.50.t.test.rkward to see what I mean.
I'm interested in finding a solution here, that might also be of interest to 
other R-frontend projects, because I think, that a lot of work could easily 
be shared across projects here.

> > I'd be happy to get some feedback on what everybody else thinks. Should
> > we rather go for a cross-platform solution with probably more developers,
> > or should we try to create a solution that fits smoothly into KDE (with
> > probably fewer developers)? Would anybody willing to contribute do so
> > only under one of these conditions?
>
> as i explain, i'm for kde integration.

That's a clear statement. I'll wait a couple of days to see, if there are 
other opinions.

> Limited number of developer for kde could be a joke.
> Think that is actually the most used desktop environment and more advanced
> solution *now* (ok, i'm ready for the flame!) and kde/qt developer know the
> way they walk with experience. Think that an increasing number of
> distribution are going to kde (united linux group and not only).

Yes of course, and there was a reason, why I chose KDE for this project. 
However, I can't deny the point, that having cross-platform compatibility is 
a good thing, too, and while there are a lot of KDE-developers, there's even 
more developers working on any platform. More specifically, the people from 
obveRsive proposed starting a common project using the FOX toolkit 
(http://www.fox-toolkit.org/), while at least for the time being, I'm the 
only C++-coder working on RKWard (that might change, of course), and I will 
at most have some few hours a week for working on it.
If we could attract some two or three more coders for RKWard, then it will 
definitely be able to stand on its own feet. Currently I'm not entirely sure, 
however.

Thomas