Re: GSOC 2013

Hi Efe,

        First - sorry for the slow reply; I guess a number of the SUSE mentors
are currently working in SUSE's hack-week - which lets them focus on
some new innovation for a week & they avoid the time-drain of E-mail; so
let me pick this up:

On Wed, 2013-04-10 at 01:50 +0300, Efe Gürkan YALAMAN wrote:
> I want to participate GSOC 2013. I am trying to contributing LO for a
> while. I was going to try "using svg for icons" for GSOC but the idea
> is deleted from the Ideas page.

        That should be no barrier to you - if you want to do something cool
like that, and you're confident enough I don't see why you shouldn't
submit a proposal for that.

        Some large proportion of UI icon loading is localised inside:

        vcl/source/gdi/impimagetree.cxx

        And could easily be tweaked for SVG import; of course with SVG we'd
need to propagate the desired size around a lot more, and naturally
falling-back to non-scalable icons in a partial SVG theme might look
poor if the sizes mis-matched; but ... in general it's not so hard I
think. More interesting are the startup performance, icon caching etc.
issues that are well worth getting right :-)

>  And that would be a little bit hard for me. So I find another and
> much more suitable idea for me, which is Dialog widget conversion.

        Sounds great.

> First of all. Let me introduce myself. :)

        Great to meet you, and we're excited about getting yo involved.

> TLDR;"My skill set:Python, C , C++,Java,C#. I can read others code.

        Skill set and aptitude seems a perfect match.

> I find interesting two ideas.
> -Dialog Widget Conversion
> -Implement a "about:config" functionality

        I'd submit a proposal for both - simply because we may be able to
accept multiple people for Dialog / Widget conversion I think.

> I don't know what to do about second idea but I tried to draw a very
> basic road map about the first Idea.

        Great :-)

> I think i can automate some part of this conversion. I don't have too
> much programming experience but I think I have enough knowledge for
> this idea.

        Automation sounds good; personally I would recommend trying to use
Lubos' Clang work, and poke in the 'compilerplugins/' directory - to
automate the C++ conversion piece.

> My first idea for implementing this work is :

        If I were you as my easy-hack to get involved I would convert one
dialog completely, and see how it goes.

> - I will have a homework about writing a parser in a few weeks so I
> will have some information about how parsing works. I think this
> homework and reading will make my work easier.(Because I think this
> idea is mostly on parsing .src files and creating .ui files with these
> data.),

        We already have a python parser for .src files lying around that Kohei
created in order to try to automate this in the past. That could be
rather useful for you :-)

        I would start from:

        git clone http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/build/
        git checkout HEAD~1
        cd scratch/layout-src2xml
        < have a play in there >

        That has no doubt bit-rotted a little, but no doubt Kohei can give you
some ideas on how to improve it. It generates (IIRC) an obsolete XML
format - that needs updating to a glad format - and of course, it needs
logic / magic to try to build a sensible container / layout tree
hierarchy - which is simply not there in the original .src files - which
(I guess) is the clever bit ;-)

> I would like to discuss the possibility of implementing this idea and
> drawing a more certain road map. Please don't hesitate to comment. :)

        Sounds good to me.

> And lastly this e-mail probably have a lot of grammar mistakes. Sorry
> about that :)

        No problem whatsoever, I'm English and produce more errors than you I
think ;-)

        Great to have you involved,

        All the best,

                Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks@suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot