[GLE-devel] GLE Updates

[LaBella, V. <vla...@al...>]

Hello GLE Users:

               I wanted to share with you the following updates to GLE.  Several users have contributed pull requests on GitHub and made suggestions for improvements.  Most notably ryandesign and rad83.  Special thanks to them.

               The most significant improvement is that GLE is now built entirely on GitHub using GitHub Actions/Workflows. This enables building of the program on all three platforms (win,mac,linux) upon each commit.  This is a huge step forward in sustaining GLE. It is no longer reliant on developers maintaining OSes and toolchains on their personal computers to deliver compiled binaries.  I want to thank ryandesign for pointing me in this direction.

               There are four main actions for building and packaging which can be seen here https://github.com/vlabella/GLE/actions.  The result of these builds, called "Artifacts" are available by clicking on the name of one of the successful actions runs denoted with a green check box.  They are built on the latest versions of all three operating systems with the most up to date version of compilers and libraries.

               The "Build" actions are run on each commit and only build the binaries.

               The "Build & Package" actions are run manually and contain the entire binary distribution including installer, manual, and sample files.

               Also the repo for the manual https://github.com/vlabella/gle-manual has a workflow that builds the PDF on each commit.

               There is a repo for the samples https://github.com/vlabella/gle-samples.  No workflows exist for this but it is used by the GLE workflow when building the installable packages.

               There are still several issues with GLE https://github.com/vlabella/GLE/issues and pull requests are always appreciated.  Debugging and testing on macOS is especially difficult as I do not have access to a mac.

Future to do list

  *   Move to Qt6 - a patch has been submitted
  *   Get gle into package repos for linux or mac (homebrew), chocolatey etc.  I am not familiar with how to do this.
  *   Fix all the issues

4.3.5 has not been officially released yet but is available under the actions tab.  I was hoping to get some feedback/QA from the community before publishing it.

Best Regards,

Vincent LaBella


4.3.5 (Not Released Yet)
    - fixed bug in GLE string function "pos" that caused issues. It was not clearing all its parameters off the stack.
    - added swap(a,b) function to swap two variables
    - new NUMROWS feature to data command to limit reading of rows in a data file (rad83).
    - manip program now building on Linux and macOS
    - added back poppler PDF support on all platforms for importing PDF files.
    - added BUILD_GUI option to control building of GUI in CMakeLists.txt
    - added BUILD_MANIP option to control building of manip in CMakeLists.txt
    - cmake searches for optional static libtiff dependencies on windows only
    - EXTRA_GSLIB_SEARCH_LOCATION option to add path for searching for gslib in qgle (linux, macOS only)
    - Several code improvements for C++17 and elimination of compiler warnings.
    - new GitHub Actions (CI/CD) for building and packaging of GLE binaries for Windows, macOS, and Linux.