Good evening! I have been busy starting a family so have been completely out of the LinuxCNC loop lately, glad to see most of the old familiar names still active, as well as the new ones!
I have not thoroughly read this thread, but I have read enough to be discouraged by some of the things said. As far as I know, we are all here for the fun of a good mental challenge and to enjoy some time away for the usual stress of work and life. I don't think anybody is trying to compete in any but a constructive manner or "steal market share" from any other GUI project. > IIUC, @hazzy had a "control agnostic UI" vision in the beginning. That > could explain why the project was created outside LinuxCNC. > But others may have better knowledge of the whys and hows... > You are 100% correct. I'm not sure where the rather obvious bitterness over the QtPyVCP project originated, but I can explain why I chose to start a seperate Qt based VCP toolkit. Here is a quick history of the origins of QtPyVCP which may prove helpful. When I first started playing with LinuxCNC (2013), I had absolutely no coding or Linux experience of any kind. I learn by doing, so I started reading the LinuxCNC source code, trying to understand it and make my own UI based off of Gmoccapy. The result of this was the first "Hazzy" (haas-like) UI I made: https://github.com/KurtJacobson/hazzy/tree/legacy I posted screenshots of Hazzy on the forms and got some interest (TurBoss for one), so I tried to figure out how I could share it with others. I found this extremely difficult as I had no GIT experience and the files I had modified to get the functionality I wanted were spread all over through the LinuxCNC code base. There is no way I would have got a PR to the main LinuxCNC accepted, since my code style was non-existent and I was intimidated by the PR process. (The linuxcnc dev community can be a little intimidating at times ...) I wished there was an easy way for newbies like myself to create and share VCPs without them needing to be polished to the same level as the main code base. This is something that Mach3 had that made a huge range if UIs available. TurBoss and I started trying to make a Mach3 style screen designer with drag and drop pre-made widgets. We did this with GtK and it worked reasonable well, but then we started having Gtk compatibility issues.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rh7IONE3Lsk TurBoss had been working with Qt for other projects, so I decided to play with Qt as an alternative to Gtk. I learned of the QtPy project, and thought it would be neat to have the same level of abstraction between the machine control (LinuxCNC, GRBL etc.) and the UI so you could develop UIs for multiple controls with the same toolkit, By this time Chris M. was starting QtVCP, so to learn Qt I started studying and helping him on various things, but I was intimidated and my creativity stifled by having to PR to the main QtVCP branch. This led me to start a repo for my vision of an abstract, control agnostic, plugin-based VCP toolkit using QtPy and PyDM as its inspiration, hence the name QtPyVCP (it was originally QtPyMD for QtPy Machine Display). While QtPyVCP has remained much closer tied to LinuxCNC-only than I originally hoped, I believe it has been successful at lowering the barrier to creating and sharing custom user interfaces. Again, use of similar technologies is a not an issue but an opportunity to > find commonalities and join forces on shared libs or whatever, freeing > resources for what is done truly differently in each project 100% > > Nothing wrong with being independent, seems to work for both projects. > > > Indeed, considering the success of QtPyVCP, as an outsider, it doesn't seem > to impede its development and progress ! > I think the very fact that it is a seperate project is what has made it so successful. It is much less intimidating for a new user to contribute to a small focussed project, than a massive sprawling code base like LinucCNC has become, and this is why I believe QtPyVCP should remain at least in a separate repo. > > I'm sure neither project wants their years of work trampled on. > > > As I said before, I believe most if not all of us are here for fun and to enjoy working together. If I Was under the impression somebody thought I was trampling on their work, I'd move on to a group that encouraged constructive turning up of the ground! > Unless you consider the LinuxCNC Qt UI land as your backyard, I can't see > how welcoming a young dynamic project with a kind and active community, a > trampling hazard for QtVCP ?! > I truly miss the LinuxCNC community! Hopefully I'll have time to get back up to speed and in the coding saddle soon! Cheers! Kurt aka Hazzy > _______________________________________________ > Emc-developers mailing list > Emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers > _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list Emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
