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

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

On Fri, 16 Aug 2019 at 23:43, LaBella, Vincent <vla...@su...>
wrote:

{ Snip}

> GLE needs some updating and these are my thoughts:
>
>
>
> 1.       64 bit compilation
>
> 2.       QT5
>
> 3.       Improved site
>
> 4.       Bug fixes
>
> 5.       New features
>
>
>
> I think 1, 2, and 3 should be a priority right now and I am happy to
> tackle item 1.  I want to use cmake.  I have been using it extensively for
> some other cross platform projects and I have a build farm setup to do
> win/mac/linux (Ubuntu 18x64).  So I could crank out the binaries when
> needed. Note that compiling for 64 bit may introduce some headaches and
> will need some testing but to priority is having it search for 64 bit gs
> and 64 bit latex. The cmake build scripts won’t interfere with the current
> build scripts so builders can choose which system they want to use.  In the
> long run cmake will be easier to maintain for cross platform builds.
>

I've never set up a cmake system myself but I've compiled loads of things
with it. In my experience, it either "just works" or it can be a nightmare
trying to track down a problem with it. Maybe that won't be a problem with
something the size of GLE. I suspect it's definitely the way to go, though.
If someone is happy to make this change, then I'm happy to test.

Maybe a native windows 64-bit version won't be too bad: the versions I use
under linux are all natively 64 bit (and it's not something that has ever
been an issue with building or running it for me). Again, happy to test.

QT4 -> QT5 looks like it's needed imminently. I had a quick look at a bit
of stuff about porting from QT4 to QT5 and it isn't methink that might have
been ant to be a big job. I did have a go at modifying the configure
scripts to pull in QT5 instead of QT4 but the build of qgle failed.
However, I hadn't previously tried building current git before making the
change and I think that currently fails with my combination of make,
compilers, etc. (About to test this and then delve into it further. It
_could_ be as simple as changing references to QT4 with QT5 in the
configure / cmake scripts and adding a few additional headers to source
files but I seriously doubt it!)

As to bugs, is the tracker on sourceforge active or is anything on there
fairly historical (I must admit to have not checked!)? For pretty much
everything I've ever needed to do, it's "just worked" and I've not really
come across any major bugs, although there has been the odd posting to the
mailing list recently (transparent keys, etc.).

One simpleish feature request I've had for a while is the ability to define
several characters as denoting comment lines in a datafile. I'm pretty sure
it's only possible to have one character at present. This would be handy
because a number of tools I use create .xvg files (for the Grace plotting
program) that have a few lines of header followed by ASCII data. The header
has a combination of "#" for comments and "@" for things like axis titles
for plotting. It's easy enough ignore a given number of lines in a data
file but then new version of the tools (or different options) can add
additional header lines and the GLE files break until the number of lines
to ignore is modified.

I suspect the code could be cleaned up a fair bit due to how it's evolved
over the years but some of that has probably already be done.

I'm feeling really encouraged by all these recent emails on the list!

Cheers,

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