Ewan Davies wrote:
Hello to the LyX list,
I've recently needed to produce a fair number of mathematical
documents and found my way to LyX as I had heard LaTeX was good with
maths. I'm very pleased with LyX and would like to contribute to
development.
I haven't got a C++ development environment set up and am not sure
what to go for as LyX seems to be buildable with any system. Have any
of the team used the Qt Creator IDE? I reckon it might be a good
choice as it is cross platform, and supports CMake. Any effort put in
to get the LyX sources working with Qt Creator would be reusable on
other systems.
If Qt Creator is a bad Idea should I go for Windows or Linux as my OS
of choice? I have easy access to both. Autotools or CMake? I there are
so many options that I'm unsure where to start.
Pointing out a few 'easy' bugs to investigate might help me too. It's
hard for a newbie to gauge how deep a problem goes!
People use lots of different things. Autotools remains the "official"
build environment, so it more or less always works. As for an editor,
that's entirely up to you. Qt Designer is obviously useful for editing
the dialogs, but that's standalone. The core LyX code is just C++, with
some Qt stuff hidden under support/, so any good C++ editor will do. I
tend to use KDevelop, but that's mostly because I'm on KDE and it's
there, and it's integrated gdb is useful. I may try QtCreator when I
upgrade to Qt 4.5, whenever that is.
As for Windows vs Linux, morally speaking, of course, you should be on
Linux. But practically speaking, if you can easily do both, then that's
great. There are often OS-specific bugs to be squashed, and only a few
of the active developers are on Windows. (What we really need are
OSX-based developers.)
Richard
