kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx>]

Well this gives me some hope. :)  We'll table this issue until after the
stable release.  Maybe wxFormBuilder development will start up again.
If not we will have to make a decision.  Thanks everyone for the input.

Cheers,

Wayne

On 8/17/2015 5:02 PM, Chris Pavlina wrote:
> Here, have another vote of confidence. Very few GUI builders aren't 
> crap, and most are fairly inflexible. wx is not a difficult toolkit to 
> work with in general and any developer who can write decent code should 
> be able to interact with it directly. Perhaps it is not a bad thing for 
> "can write wx code" to be the "you must be this tall to enter" for the 
> kicad codebase? ;) wxformbuilder is buggy - seriously, does anybody here 
> *enjoy* working with that thing?? - and doesn't support some of the 
> nicer widgets.
> 
> As for future plans to port to Qt - as much more as I like Qt than wx, 
> that'd be rather a waste of dev time IMO.
> 
> 
> On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 01:26:02PM -0400, Wayne Stambaugh wrote:
>> On 8/17/2015 9:14 AM, David Novak wrote:
>>>> To be honest, I've never been a big fan of dialog box layout tools.
>>>> Their strength is there weakness.  They promote designing quick dialog
>>>> box layouts that makes reuse difficult.  Take a look at the padding and
>>>> overall layout in KiCad's dialogs.  They are all over the map.  I prefer
>>>> hand coding dialogs.  It's painfully slow but encourages reuse (well
>>>> designed base dialog classes) and standardization (using wxSizerFlags).
>>>
>>> I agree with Wayne. Dialog layout tools are nice to get up and running
>>> quickly, but the more I use them, the more they get in the way. On
>>> internal projects, my team ends up implementing workarounds for advanced
>>> features.
>>>
>>> I've recently started trying to convince my team to code the dialogs by
>>> hand. In my mind, with a little planning up front, hand coding the
>>> dialog could be relatively quick.
>>>
>>> David
>>>
>>
>> Thanks for the vote of confidence.  I thought I was the lone voice in
>> the woods when it came to hand coding dialogs.  I doubt we will have an
>> easy time convincing everyone else it's a good idea.  That being said,
>> we may end up in a position where we have no option if there is not a
>> viable open source option.  I would reject using a proprietary tool and
>> I don't want to waste precious KiCad development resources maintaining
>> wxFormBuilder.
>>
>>>
>>> On 8/13/2015 2:41 PM, Wayne Stambaugh wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On 8/13/2015 2:05 PM, jp charras wrote:
>>>>> Le 13/08/2015 18:36, Eldar Khayrullin a écrit :
>>>>>> Hi all.
>>>>>> Maybe in future need to port kicad in other modern gui as qt(
>>>>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software) )
>>>>> A bit overkilled for this issue (if this is an issue).
>>>>> I am not especially thrilled by QT.
>>>>> This is a very good tool, but it has its own issues.
>>>>> Good luck to volunteers who will port 400 000 lines of code relative
>>>>> to GUI.
>>>>> (80% of code of any application; Kicad has more than 500 000 lines of
>>>>> code)
>>>> We'll leave that decision to the next project manager.  This project
>>>> manager is not interested porting KiCad to QT.  This has been discussed
>>>> before.
>>>>
>>>>>> 13.08.2015 13:00, Blair Bonnett пишет:
>>>>>>> Hi all,
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> It appears wxFormBuilder is, if not dead, not far from it. The
>>>>>>> evidence:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> * No stable release in 4 years, and the last beta release was 13
>>>>>>> months ago.
>>>>> Although I agree with the fact wxFormBuilder is not actively maintained,
>>>>> the last release was made the 17 June.
>>>>>
>>>>> I share your concern about wxFormBuilder.
>>>>>
>>>>> But replacing it is not easy.
>>>>>
>>>>> To answer one of your questions, before using wxFormBuilder, I used
>>>>> DialogBox (free version).
>>>> I'm reluctant to use proprietary tools for all of the usual reasons.  I
>>>> would rather code dialogs by hand than use a proprietary tool.
>>>>
>>>>> It worked fine and was easy to use.
>>>>> It is written and maintained by the creator of wxWidgets.
>>>>>
>>>>> But the user code is embedded in automatically generated DialogBox.
>>>>> I did not used recent versions, so it is perhaps now different.
>>>>>
>>>>> One on the *best features* of wxFormBuilder is the fact it creates
>>>>> "black box" files and all the user code is in other files.
>>>>> You even do not need to read them.
>>>>>
>>>>> Any other candidate should have this feature.
>>>>>
>>>>> We need volunteers to test other candidates (in fact a very few
>>>>> candidates)
>>>> To be honest, I've never been a big fan of dialog box layout tools.
>>>> Their strength is there weakness.  They promote designing quick dialog
>>>> box layouts that makes reuse difficult.  Take a look at the padding and
>>>> overall layout in KiCad's dialogs.  They are all over the map.  I prefer
>>>> hand coding dialogs.  It's painfully slow but encourages reuse (well
>>>> designed base dialog classes) and standardization (using wxSizerFlags).
>>>>   I got shot down the last time I suggested this and I understand the
>>>> reasoning.
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>> * A grand total of 13 commits in the last 12 months (current trunk is
>>>>>>> r2205, r2192 was made on 1 August 2014). A number of these are
>>>>>>> buildsystem / release / changelog (!) updates.
>>>>>>> * No developer responses on the mailing list, including to a message
>>>>>>> three months ago [1] asking if the project was still active.
>>>>>>> * No support for newer widgets. For example, the wxSpinCtrlDouble
>>>>>>> widget added in wxWidgets 2.9.0 is not supported. I patched it to add
>>>>>>> this widget back in April and posted the patch to both the mailing
>>>>>>> list and an existing ticket from three years ago [2]. No response to
>>>>>>> that either.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> We may have to start thinking about whether we continue with it from
>>>>>>> here, or consider a move towards a different tool.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I realise any change like this isn't going to happen prior to the
>>>>>>> stable release, and nor am I suggesting it should. But with the recent
>>>>>>> post to this list about UI improvements, I think this is a highly
>>>>>>> related topic which should be discussed as well.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> There are a number of alternatives listed on the wxWidgets wiki [3].
>>>>>>> Does anybody have any experience with any of them? (Spoiler alert, I
>>>>>>> don't). Are there any thoughts on how to proceed from here?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Regards
>>>>>>> Blair
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> [1] https://sourceforge.net/p/wxformbuilder/mailman/message/34100789/
>>>>>>> [2] https://sourceforge.net/p/wxformbuilder/feature-requests/45/
>>>>>>> [3]
>>>>>>> https://wiki.wxwidgets.org/Tools#Rapid_Application_Development_.2F_GUI_Builders
>>>>>>>
>>>>>
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