Re: [GLE-general] Problems with QGLE on windows 10

[Laurence A. <lau...@yo...>]

On Wed, 14 Aug 2019 at 19:46, Christian T. Steigies <ct...@de...> wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 13, 2019 at 05:58:39PM +0200, Zbigniew Kisiel wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > I'm also an ASCII old timer over several different operating systems and
> gle
> > implementations.
>
> Interesting. My former advisor was using GLE on a DOS machine, and I think
> later on windows. So half of the people on the list had to support their
> boss with GLE? :-)
>

Ditto!

We just like the way it creates nice, clean graphs and does what it's told!

> I now use gle in two ways:
> > 1/ my graphics programs automatically generate gle scripts of what they
> > display
> > 2/ diagrams are reedited from some old version (such as that from
> automatic
> > output)
>
> I started to use tikz to do this directly in LaTeX. This may be even more
> powerful than GLE, except maybe for the data plotting part. For this I
> still
> prefer GLE over all other tools.
>

I'd not seen tikz before: I might find that handy for the odd thing but
there's no way my boss would move to latex as well as a new plotting
program!


> I am not suggesting to drop QGLE, I am sure it is a useful tool. However
> the
> next Debian release (in two years?) may not support Qt4 apps anymore. So
> either QGLE gets ported to Qt5, or Debian/bullseye will have GLE without
> QGLE. Maybe it is not so hard, but I have never written a Qt app. These
> suggestions seem to fix already half of the problems:
>
> https://www.ics.com/blog/porting-desktop-applications-qt-4-qt-5
>
> This seems to take a little more work:
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26180311/qhttp-in-not-available-in-qt5


I had a quick read around yesterday and (allegedly) porting from Qt4 to Qt5
has been designed to be fairly straightforward.

I might try to have a fiddle over the next few days, although it would mean
that I'd have to delve into the guts of autoconf, etc. to do it properly! I
tried a quick test yesterday (on Debian) just changing qmake-qt4 to
qmake-qt5 within the qgle directory and that did create me a makefile.
Compilation then died pretty quickly. I suspect this was mostly due to
missing qt5 -dev packages. I'm hoping that a suitably prepared configure
script will shout at me clearly what ones are missing, rather than
installing a load of random ones on the off chance!

As an aside, I tested the qgle that was already built and it "mostly
worked" with ghostscript 9.27: it worked fine for one gle file but
immediately caused a seg fault with another one! I might also look into any
recent API changes in ghostscript...

Cheers,

Laurence
-- 
Dr Laurence Abbott <lau...@yo...>
Department of Chemistry,
University of York,
YO10 5DD, UK