I am happy to announce that Alban Rochel of the QSAS team has just donated
(revision 9675 with some small build-system help from me) an extensive
Qt4-based device driver to PLplot under the LGPL.  It currently builds using
the cmake options -DPLD_rasterqt=ON -DPLD_svgqt=ON -DPLD_epspdfqt=ON
-DPLD_qtwidget=ON for Qt-Version 4.4.3 (package libqt4-dev) on my Debian
Lenny platform.  I have so far only lightly tested this is the installed
examples tree, but there -dev svgqt and -dev epspdfqt seem to work while
-dev rasterqt and -dev qtwidget don't seem to work for me.  I haven't had a
chance to look deeper into those non-working devices, but it is possible I
need to install something more on my system in order for those to work.

Note, the build system component of our new qt-based device driver is still
pretty crude.  For example, I believe you must use all of the above cmake
options to get any of them to work, but I hope to straighten that out
shortly.  In addition Alban has some further development he would like to do
now that this initial version is more or less working. So you should expect
quite a bit of development activity for this device driver, but please help
out by testing it, and if you do find some issue, please specify the
revision that you used for your testing.

Qt4 is a world-class cross-platform application and UI framework that is the
basis for the KDE, one of the two most popular Linux desktops (with GNOME
being the other one).  Qt4 is licensed under your choice of the LGPL or GPL
(and other licenses) so it is compatible with the LGPL licensing of PLplot.
KDE and Qt4 are built with CMake (which was my original inspiration for
changing PLplot over to a CMake-based build system).  It more-or-less works
for me on Linux, and Alban on Mac OS X.  Because of the cross-platform
nature of CMake, I think the chances are good Qt4 and this device driver
based on it should also work on our Windows-based platforms as well, but
that needs confirmation and possibly build-system fixes from the developers
here with access to MinGW, Cygwin, and bare Windows.

In sum, I am very pleased that we now have a device driver based on Qt4.

Thanks, Alban!

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
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