A Guppi Update (A Gupdate?)

[Jon Trowbridge <trow emccta com>]

Here is a quick update on Guppi development --- in particular, the
news from GUADEC:

>>> Guile

While at GUADEC, I had the pleasure of meeting Maciej Stachowiak, who
is the new Guile maintainer (as well as being one of the Eazel
hackers).  I told him about the many guile-related problems that Guppi
has experienced, and I was very happy to hear that he is totally
committed to better differentiating major and minor Guile releases.
After talking to him, I'm confident that our Guile problems will soon
be a thing of the past.

(BTW, Andy Hertzfeld's Nautilus demo was amazingly cool: I never
thought that I'd see a graphical shell that I'd rather use than a
command line...)


>>> The X Font Mess

After talking to Miguel and Federico, I'm now reasonably up-to-date on
the whole font situation: thanks to progress in gnome-print, it looks
like it is now possible to draw nice anti-aliased text in a canvas
without totally killing performance.

These technical issues are the main reason why Guppi's plots haven't
had labelled axes, titles, etc.  I hope to rectify this soon.


>>> Gnumeric Integration / Bonobo

I also got a chance to meet Gnumeric super-hackers Jody Goldberg and
Michael Meeks.  Jody and I discussed plans for integrating Guppi and
Gnumeric.

We'd like to allow Guppi plots to be embedded, via the Bonobo
component architecture, inside of Gnumeric spreadsheets.  An important
part of implementing this is a nice feature in its own right: the
ability to share data between Gnumeric and Guppi, so that (for
example) data from a live Gnumeric spreadsheet could be exported to
Guppi and still remain "attached", so that changes to the data in one
app would be visible in the other.

Once Guppi is Bonobo-ified, it should be very, very easy to embed
Guppi plots in any other GNOME application, not just Gnumeric.
Obviously, this would be a good thing.

There was some vague talk about Guppi possibly being designated as the
"official" plotting engine for Gnumeric, but that remains to be sorted
out.  (As those of you following Gnumeric development know, the latest
Gnumeric release contains some initial plotting code written by
(I believe) Miguel.  IMNSHO, though, that code isn't general or
scalable enough to handle more sophisticated plots or to provide good
interactivity --- so I think that Guppi will be able to edge it out...
but I really shouldn't say anything, because Miguel & Co. are
veritable coding machines, and they don't have day jobs slowing them
down.  In any case, it will be interesting to see what happens.)


>>> Generalities

Besides the people I mention above, I met a whole bunch of great
people, and I did a whole bunch of Guppi demos for people who haven't
been following development.  There is a lot of interest in the
project --- it was all very encouraging.

Now I have to get back into Guppi hacking in a serious way.  It is
dangerous to make predictions, but *maybe* a Bonobo-enabled release of
Guppi with nicely labelled axes, as possibly other fun features,
*might* emerge in a month or so... it all depends on how much free
time I have.


-JT


-- 
GNU/Linux: Free your mind and your OS will follow.