[GSoC] GSoC Update

[Oleksandr Moskalenko]

* Hermann Kraus <herm at scribus.info> [2008-07-04 20:32:56 +0200]:

> Hi!
> 
> Yes, I'm still alive, but I had an important exam today.
> 
> My current status is: I'm a bit behind my schedule, because of the  
> following things:
> a) Exam
> b) Personal problems
> c) Many problems with GraphicsMagick

Herm,

You situation resembles a case study in why good communication is essential to
a success of a gsoc project. I say almost because your skill and determination
may likely pull this off and being a part of the team you have the advantage
of continuing working on this issue beyond the scope of gsoc. I would like to
attempt to caution you against circumventing the gsoc project structure. Do
remember that being a more experienced gsoc participant you are setting an
example for others and one of the major points of this exercise is to
accomplish something in a certain timeframe and withing a certain project
structure.

Please do communicate with your assigned mentor frequently as well as the rest
of the team and gsoc project admins when needed at least through our gsoc
list. Hearing nothing from you unless a communication is directly requested is
detrimental to the quality of the gsoc program. You also could've saved quite
a bit of time if someone would help you with some of the difficulties you had.
There is always a probability that team's shared expertise encompasses the
issues you described. We all are also curious about and interested in the
progress of your project.

I wish you well in conquering both your personal problems and your educational
challenges and am looking forward to hearing more from you as the summer
progresses.

Cheers,

Alex.

P.S.: To all three of our students: here is a great example of a good summer
of code student blog that is both informative and conducive to productive
collaboration between a student and project mentors.
http://people.freedesktop.org/~joonas/status-blog/


> I hope these are all solved now, and I will really try hard to get the  
> GraphicsMagick code ready till the midterm evaluation.
> Currently the following works:
> - Buildsystem (this was really hard)
> - Loading RGB images
> - Loading CMYK images partially works
> 
> What doesn't work:
> - Exporting PDFs (but the fix should be trivial)
> - Selecting GraphicsMagick as the import filter for all formats (currently  
> it has to be named *.bmp, regardless of the actual format)
> 
> Here are some of the problems I encountered:
> - Cmake is supposed to be easy, but it isn't when you have to learn it  
>  from scratch and the project is already quite big.
> - GraphicsMagick build system is totally stupid. They ship pkg-config  
> files, but trying to build with pkg-config results in incomplete builds.
>    You have to use GraphicsMagick++-config which returns completely  
> different values than pkg-config.
> - Both GraphicsMagick and ImageMagick call their headerfiles "Magick++.h"  
> and define constants with the same names there. BUT - and this is really  
> anoying - the values differ. To make it even worse I #include  
> <GraphicsMagick/Magick++.h> and gcc chooses ImageMagick's version for some  
> reason. This resulted in crashes, wrong data and many strange effect till  
> i finally found out what happened. This took very much time to debug.
> - I can't find CMYK related documentation for scribus and therefore have  
> to try to understand the format by reading the tiff plugin which is quite  
> complex.
> 
> So I'll do my best to get it working till monday.
> 
> Hermann
> 
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