[Xastir-dev] xastir v2 as a student project?

[Tom Russo]

On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 09:29:35AM -0500, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <kg4wsv at gmail.com> flavor, containing:
> good morning all,
> 
> Qt is becoming quite popular around here as a software engineering
> tool.  One of the profs saw xastir up on my old laptop and asked a few
> questions, and pretty soon we were discussing a port of xastir to Qt
> as a 2 semester software engineering course project.  It's got UI,
> hardware interfacing, database stuff, GIS, existing code to
> decipher/reverse engineer, etc; lots of goodies from an instructional
> viewpoint.

I am becoming fond of Qt.  In fact, for the last week I've been using it
to develop a little tool I've talked about for years but never done --- a
gadget to accept DF bearing reports, compute fixes, and send objects to 
a running Xastir instance through the server port.  It's pretty much my 
first real GUI project, and Qt's tools are pretty nice.

I think that Qt would be a fine thing to use for a cross-platform APRS
program.  One might also consider using QGIS as a library for map rendering
(it's also based on Qt).

> I have no idea if this will actually fly, but I was wondering how the
> xastir community, especially the developers, felt about the idea.


> Of course, since much of the code is GPLed it could be considered a
> fork. No big deal.

Yeah, no big deal for it being a fork, really.

I wouldn't call it "Xastir2" though, because if you're just grabbing big
chunks of existing code and wrapping a new GUI around it, it's more "Qastir"
than a new redesign.  The guts of Xastir need some serious refactor, which
is what I had hoped the Xastir 2 development would have been had it ever
gotten out of the talking stage --- it's been brought up, discussed, and
re-vaporized every year or two since I first downloaded Xastir in 2002 (or
was it 2001?).

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236        http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
  In some cultures what I do would be considered normal. 
                                  -- Ineffective daily affirmation