Releases and Branches and Conferences

Development
1

Hey guys,

I will be in Vegas this coming week for a conference and then my bad “The
Poison Control Center” is going on tour for three weeks. I will (hopefully)
be working diligently not only on Avogadro but on my Comprehensive exam and
some other stuff i have going on.

About release; I think we should put the threaded GLWidget in there. It’s a
pretty cool thing and a big deal. Also it seems to be pretty stable. I
think the design is there where it needs to be. I will hopefully merge the
branch back into the main source tree if that’s cool with everyone. I know
benoit is working on some new GL picking things and so if they can make it
into the release that’s cool. I will have some stuff I need to implement for
GAMESS EFP by the end of this summer. So maybe we should try to have a
release in July and then another release by August? The EFP stuff should’ve
been in there but I was distracted by threading. It was a matza ball of fun.
Oh, Geoff, can you try the threaded_opengl branch and see how/if it works on
Mac. I’ll give it a shot on Windows. From the QT4 documentation, it should
work flawless on mac and windows if it works on X11.

Also, if you haven’t checked out all the cool stuff Marcus has done like the
tools you should definatly check them out. Also a lot of behind-the-scenes
stuff is great too (painter work).

Our biggest downfall now is copying/duplicating settings and stuff like that.
I, like always, suggest not just throwing it together unless it’s something
we can easily throw away and/or WILL eventually get to it. But i feel really
good with where we’re at. Obviously we want new features but being able to
save default engines / setup is important. Also having a project file format
for ourselves in something we should consider. As for libavogadro i’m
really open to stuff. I know there is going to be a lot of focus on the
crystal structure stuff (which is partially why Benoit is hacking away at our
picking system) which should be cool.

I can’t really think of anything else off the top of my head and i need to
cook dinner. I will be in touch over email. Adios.

–
Donald

2

my bad “The Poison Control Center” is going on tour for three weeks.

I hope that was a Freudian slip. “bad” band?

I just checked the threaded branch. There were some weird redraw
issues when I turned on labels or debug, but I think that’s from the
same area as the existing bug report.

Also, if you haven’t checked out all the cool stuff Marcus has done
like the
tools you should definatly check them out. Also a lot of behind-
the-scenes
stuff is great too (painter work).

Ditto. There’s a lot of really great code going in right now.

July for 0.2.0.
August for 0.3.0.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to help out much on these releases,
but I can certainly help put the “spit and polish” as we near a 1.0
release. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say we could have a great
1.0 release in the fall.

Our biggest downfall now is copying/duplicating settings and stuff
like that.

I think the best approach to that is to use the copy constructor more
heavily. So rather than just create a new GLWidget, put some
intelligence when we pass an existing GLWidget from newView().

…

save default engines / setup is important. Also having a project
file format
for ourselves in something we should consider.

The latter will take some Open Babel hacking, but it’s a good idea. I
think we should try to keep things like this on the wiki or the
Feature Request tracker so we don’t forget.

As for libavogadro i’m really open to stuff. I know there is going
to be a lot of focus on the
crystal structure stuff …

I suspect that both protein ribbons and surfaces will cause some
changes here. We might also consider whether we need more primitives.
I wonder about a graphical plane, an arrow/vector, a pseudo-bond
(i.e., marking the distance between two points), a pseudo-atom (e.g.,
a centroid of a selection of atoms), etc.

This just goes to show that it’s easy to come up with more good
ideas. :slight_smile:

The current code is really very nice. I’m already using it
exclusively for day-to-day use.

Cheers,
-Geoff

3

On Saturday 23 June 2007 01:33:35 Donald Ephraim Curtis wrote:

I will be in Vegas this coming week for a conference and then my bad “The
Poison Control Center” is going on tour for three weeks. I will
(hopefully) be working diligently not only on Avogadro but on my
Comprehensive exam and some other stuff i have going on.

I am at aKademy from Friday for just over a week in sunny Glasgow :slight_smile:

About release; I think we should put the threaded GLWidget in there. It’s
a pretty cool thing and a big deal. Also it seems to be pretty stable. I
think the design is there where it needs to be. I will hopefully merge the
branch back into the main source tree if that’s cool with everyone. I know
benoit is working on some new GL picking things and so if they can make it
into the release that’s cool. I will have some stuff I need to implement
for GAMESS EFP by the end of this summer. So maybe we should try to have a
release in July and then another release by August? The EFP stuff
should’ve been in there but I was distracted by threading. It was a matza
ball of fun. Oh, Geoff, can you try the threaded_opengl branch and see
how/if it works on Mac. I’ll give it a shot on Windows. From the QT4
documentation, it should work flawless on mac and windows if it works on
X11.

I think the threaded GLWidget is great. I was going to check out tools and
extensions to see if they work OK. I have enjoyed working on threading
although I am not sure how helpful I really managed to be in this area. I
will try to iron out any remaining bugs in it.

Also, if you haven’t checked out all the cool stuff Marcus has done like
the tools you should definatly check them out. Also a lot of
behind-the-scenes stuff is great too (painter work).

I am also working on multiple painters that I would like to get in. I have
discussed the design with Benoit, base painter class and then a virtually
unchanged painter for the glwidget. It will allow me to write a povray
painter to allow povray export of our scenes. From there it should allow us
to write a Qutemol style painter if you have a GPU with programmable shaders.
It would require that all engines use painter primitives only if they are to
be drawn by all painters. Overlays could probably be an exception as we don’t
need them to be drawn necessarily in exported images. SVG and PS export
should also be pretty easy using this methodology.

Our biggest downfall now is copying/duplicating settings and stuff like
that. I, like always, suggest not just throwing it together unless it’s
something we can easily throw away and/or WILL eventually get to it. But i
feel really good with where we’re at. Obviously we want new features but
being able to save default engines / setup is important. Also having a
project file format for ourselves in something we should consider. As for
libavogadro i’m really open to stuff. I know there is going to be a lot of
focus on the crystal structure stuff (which is partially why Benoit is
hacking away at our picking system) which should be cool.

I think it is one area where we currently fall down a little - it would be
great to have window set up saved, engine settings etc. I think we are in
great shape and have lots of ideas for future work. Hopefully chatting to
people at aKademy and attending talks and BoFs etc will be helpful and boost
my coding knowledge.

I can’t really think of anything else off the top of my head and i need to
cook dinner. I will be in touch over email. Adios.

I think it would be great to get a release out soon. There is a lot of
interest in Avogadro and some of the new features. Even if it is not perfect
I think it would be good to get an updated release out so that people can
easily get a copy to try. Do we have contacts at any other distros too? I can
take care of Gentoo but I was thinking kubuntu/ubuntu, Debian, OpenSUSE,
Madriva etc. I could probably build a couple of VMs to make some packages if
there are any we would particularly like to target.

Would be good to get something out early enough to allow Geoff to build a Mac
release. Does anyone else have access to a Mac?

Thanks,

Marcus