On Fri, 16 Jan 2015 12:55:35 +0100
Benjamin Kehlet <[email protected]> wrote:

> I agree with Garth and Jan that Qt should be removed. The Qt

I didn't say whether Qt should be removed. I don't think that there's a
strong need to remove it unless it requires in a future any maintenance
which nobody wants to do.

With a removal, VTK plots will loose a capability of closing a window.

> functionality was added to make it possible to reuse the plotting
> functionality in third party Qt applications, but this is (apparently)
> not used at all. The plotting code should really be kept as minimal as
> possible.
> 
> If someone wants to embed the plots in Qt (or another GUI framework),
> it is better to expose the what is needed to do that outside of
> Dolfin. (I haven't looked into this, but it may be possible already by
> using VTKWindowOutputStage).

This is exactly what is done. There are few #ifdef HAS_QVTK switching
between vtkRenderWindowInteractor implementation and QVTKWidget
implementation. If we remove Qt, QVTK (I'm not sure how coupled are
these two dependencies; anyway DOLFIN requires both or none) then this
interface will be gone.

Code in plot-qt demo is just application using this interface.

Finally, the apparent confusion of new users by enormous number of
useless dependencies is rather problem of documentation. There should
be clearly stated:

 1. What is dependency for.
 2. Which dependencies are recommended to have useful DOLFIN.

Jan

> 
> Regards
> 
> Benjamin
> 
> 2015-01-15 21:33 GMT+01:00 Anders Logg <[email protected]>:
> > I would vote for keeping the Qt functionality for a while longer.
> > It was added in case we would later needed (for users that want to
> > wrap DOLFIN plots inside applications).
> >
> > But I agree with needing to reduce the number of dependencies.
> >
> > --
> > Anders
> >
> >
> > Thu Jan 15 2015 at 5:28:36 PM skrev Garth N. Wells
> > <[email protected]>:
> >>
> >> It would be nice if we can reduce the number of optional
> >> dependencies in DOLFIN - it's confusing for users to know which
> >> optional dependencies they really should have, e.g. PETSc, and
> >> which they very likely do not need, e.g. QT.
> >>
> >> Garth
> >>
> >> On Thu, 15 Jan, 2015 at 3:18 PM, Jan Blechta
> >> <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> > Garth suggested removing Qt dependency. Here are some facts to be
> >> > considered
> >> >
> >> >  1. DOLFIN links to libQtCore, libQtGui
> >> >       - cost:
> >> >          - linking problems, recently on support mailing list but
> >> >            rather rare
> >> >          - size of libdolfin.so, Release build type, with
> >> > everything except PaStiX and slepc4py:
> >> >              - with Qt 8M
> >> >              - without Qt 8M
> >> >          - memory footprint after "from dolfin import *"
> >> >                            VIRT  RES SHR
> >> >              - with Qt     751M 101M 39M
> >> >              - without Qt  679M  97M 48M
> >> >            This is rather negligible.
> >> >       - advantages:
> >> >          - Plot window can be closed!
> >> >
> >> >  2. there is plot-qt demo demonstrating how interactive widget
> >> > allowing
> >> >       - basically what usual VTK plotting does
> >> >       - plus reporting some numbers on mouse hover
> >> >       - plus marking cells by clicking on them
> >> >     for the prize of 252 lines of C++ code (without comments and
> >> > blank lines). According to git log in that directory, it seems
> >> > that the code is not fragile and did not need maintenance nearly
> >> > at all so far.
> >> >
> >> >     Similarly, Qt, QVTK related code in dolfin/plot is rather
> >> > minimal and does not require much maintenance. But this isn't so
> >> >     straightforward to check.
> >> >
> >> > Jan
> >>
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> >
> >
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