On 03/23/2012 01:20 PM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote: > 2012/3/23 Daniel J Sebald<daniel.seb...@ieee.org>: >> One question is whether people are more productive using a GUI >> versus a command line and an editor like gvim or whatever. > > This is irrelevant.
No it's not. Being productive is important. > They want a GUI. You are not going to convince > them that they don't want a GUI. The first thing every new user does > when they install Octave is (1) look for a GUI to install or (2) > complain that there is no GUI. Give the people what they want, I suppose. But honestly, providing a service that can process data, analyze data, do numerical integration, plot data with all sorts of output formats like EPS, PDF, and LaTeX is not enough? It has to have a GUI before people will accept it? If these people were paying in an acceptable currency, then we can talk. >> To get my support with a GUI effort, the GUI has to bring some >> feature to the table above and beyond what the command line can do. > > But we don't want your support. Nor mine. The only reason we're making > a GUI is because everyone but you and me and other people who post on > this list immediately say the reason Octave sucks is because it has no > GUI. > >> Whether maintainers should be supporting a GUI is another question. >> It's a lot of work. > > Sure, and there also seems to be a lot of people other than you and me > who are willing to do this work. We should tell those people that what > everyone seems to like is GUI Octave, and if we are going to convince > all the people installing GUI Octave that they shouldn't be doing so, > the easiest way is to make our GUI look exactly the same. I may be missing some info here. Is GUI Octave a non open source project? >> Just use GUI Octave developed as it's own project and contribute to >> that. > > We can't contribute to it. It has no public source code and the author > doesn't want his artistic integrity tarnished by our patches (really, > he said to me as much, comparing source code to art). Oh. That I didn't know. If the program writer doesn't want to make it open source that is his or her prerogative. But why use GUI Octave as a standard? Why not just MathWorks' GUI as a standard? Like I say, the GUI has to bring something to the table, which MathWorks does but GUI Octave doesn't. All those masses saying Octave is feckless because it doesn't have a GUI will start saying Octave is feckless because it has this wimpy plot like GUI Octave that doesn't allow moving objects around using a mouse, or doesn't have a method for designing application GUIs. Also, many companies don't use Octave, not because it doesn't have a GUI, but because it is open source and many companies have a policy against open source software for its employees because IT departments have a difficult time maintaining that. Whether that is well-founded policy I'm not sure, but in some circumstances it is. Dan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF email is sponsosred by: Try Windows Azure free for 90 days Click Here http://p.sf.net/sfu/sfd2d-msazure _______________________________________________ Octave-dev mailing list Octave-dev@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/octave-dev
