Re: [Gpsbabel-misc] Installing gpsbabel on Intel Edison

[Allen E. <all...@ol...>]

"Install Qt" isn't that obvious to this non expert.  LIke I said, I asked
Intel technical support how to install Qt and they gave me this link
http://hobby.farit.ru/qt5-gui-intel-edison/.  Pretty obvious from comments
on this thread that it was not the correct set of instructions.  The next
place I found for installing Qt on Yocto was on StackOverflow. The link was
dead.  I decoded where it had moved to and it was a boot to Qt, which also
didn't look right.

So IMHO, "Install Qt" is not a sufficient set of instructions.

Pardon me if I drop out.  I am not trying to complain, just trying to give
some feedback to help the next person.

Allen

On Mon, Jul 17, 2017 at 11:06 AM, Robert Lipe <rob...@gp...>
wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, Jul 17, 2017 at 12:18 PM, SRE <ste...@cl...> wrote:
>
>> At 09:43 AM 7/17/17, Allen Edwards wrote:
>> >I am almost done with the C code of my translator and yes, it is not
>> difficult.
>>
>> Note to developers: Qt brought some benefits, but the cost (binary
>> size and install-to-buildbuild complexity) is too high for many.
>>
>
> ​Development, particularly cross-platform, is hard.​
>
> For Mac and Windows users, go to the cited page, see you need to install
> Qt, and you're ready to go. You have compilers, IDE, debugger, etc.
> Most Linux and other open source OSes already have Qt packaged for your
> OS; you just have to find it. The page I cited includes Fedora, CentOS, and
> Ubuntu. I simply can't list the name and instructions for all 294 Linux
> <http://distrowatch.com/search.php?ostype=All&category=All&origin=All&basedon=All&notbasedon=None&desktop=All&architecture=All&status=Active>distros.
> I'm not sure we want to be a tutorial for setting up development
> environment any more than we want to teach C++. Reasonable help with
> questions seems like all we should do.
>
>
>> Perhaps a build procedure listing all the steps from a basic OS
>> install to building GPSBabel would "illuminate" whether there are
>> too many dependencies for the average programmer-level hack, or
>>
>
> ​1) Get GPSBabel source.​
> ​2) Install Qt if you haven't already done so.
> 3) Either ./configure && make if you're into command line development on a
> UNIX-y system or start Qt Creator with GPSBabel.pro if you want an IDE
> and/or you're on Windows.
>
>
>
>> a pre-built binary. Potential contributors will just roll their own
>> if they can't build yours with a reasonable investment, and we're
>>
>
> ​As for size, it's true that we no longer fit on a floppy, but it's not
> like​ multi-megabyte apps aren't the norm these days. When I solved things
> like robust XML serialization or sub-second, pre-1970 time with Qt, that
> cost us some space, but it's not like solving it WELL would have been any
> easier to explain (the number of programmers familiar with Qt > number
> familiar with any API I'd have invented from scratch) or likely much
> smaller. Finally having a robust, well documented String library is so
> nice. Having to never worry about an uninitialized member of, say, an RGB
> structure is nice. It's absolutely true that we're bigger than we used to
> be in the process.
>
> ​I know you've always struggled with your development environment and
> we've never really had a critical mass of Windows devs. ​Because we touch
> hardware, we've always had problem modules like Delorme's use of USB/HID
> (one reason I dropped it) and Garmin's need for libusb on Mac and Linux
> (the Linux USB changed the API but aren't interested in changing and
> retesting us. Since the GPSes involved are all over 10 years old and the
> number of patches I've seen for them in the last 10 years is approaching
> zero, that's not very interesting) So we do have some sharp edges. For
> Garmin's USB proto, we solve this on Mac by providing our own USB. On
> Linux, we rely on the system libusb, which is subject to the above frailty.
> So our external dependencies are a bit uglier than, say, SleepyHead
> <https://gitlab.com/sleepyhead/sleepyhead-code>, another cross-platform
> Qt app.
>
> It's not like we've ever had more than 3-4 active developers at a time for
> very long and I don't think that making that three step list into a six
> step list that showed how to use get checkout or unzip an archive or
> whatever we'd even double that number. I think that asking for help and
> hoping someone has encountered the same problem you have is reasonable.
>
> In this case, Allen asked a development question on the misc list instead
> of the development list (which is something that I - or anyone else -
> should have pointed out) about a system so obscure that there wasn't a
> critical mass of developers on the misc list to help him out. In fairness,
> I doubt that he'd have gotten any more help on -code on a Sunday.
>
> ​As for competition, if someone else wants to build a better GPSBabel for
> whatever reason from scratch rather than accept the help given, that's OK
> with me. If it helps the next person that wants to parse NMEA on an Arduino
> or whatever, that's great for everyone.
>
> RJL​
>
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