- summary Concept of Porting TortoiseGit to QT.
- labels Phase-Design,Phase-Requirements
TortoiseGit is based on the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) of Visual Studio. The old fashioned MFC framework has many limitations in modern software UI design and it is not available in Express Edition of Visual Studio.
A new GUI-Toolkit should support the most important Operating Systems (Windows, Linux, MacOSX).
This page is created to bring together some ideas to port TGit to the GUI Platform QT.
Information about QT: http://www.qt-project.org.
* VLC * KDE * Dreamworks Movie Tools * Rohde & Schwarz Oscillocopes * DFS - Deutsche Flugsicherung (Munich Airport) * Adobe Photoshop Album * Autodesk Maja * Google Earth * Skype * VirtualBox * Netflix * ...
* Cross platform: Support almost all Desktop and Mobile platforms (http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/supported-platforms.html) * A lot of useful base classes in QtCore with things like list, stringclasses, vectors, dictionaries,.... (http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/classes.html) * A lot of GUI elements like list, tree views, grids, labels, webkit webbrowser, .... (http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/classes.html) * GUI elements are placed in layout with automatic resizing. * Automatic extraction of Text from Source for translation with QtLinguist. (TortoiseGit currently uses po format plus a self-made converter ResText) * Styleable GUI with Stylesheets (QSS). Similar to Cascading Style Sheets) * UI is defined in QtDesigner and is based on an XML-File (.ui). * Modular Design. Extensions for Multimedia, XML, .... * Great OpenGL Support * Model View System to abstract data from the GUI. A data model can be attached to one or more TreeViews * QT Resource File allow to embed any data in the executable. This will be accessed like a file system.
SubmoduleUpdate dialog in default design:
The same dialog styled with QSS:
* Converting MFC Resource Files Rebuilding all dialogs in QtDesigner is a lot of work. It is much better to write a converter from MFC RC to QT UI. There was some tools like KDAB Knut that do this task, but AFAIK it is not available anymore.
The best way is to write a converter in python that is based on a real parser like ply to read Microsoft RC files and build initial UI files with this data. Of course, this ui files must be afterwards edited (e. g. place elements in layouts),
Since mfc2qt might be also interesting for other project, there is a git repo at gitgub for that: https://github.com/dbcb/mfc2qt
* mfc2qt --create-qrc TortoiseProcENG.rc tortoise_proc.qrc Creates an Qt Resource with the images, icons, ... * mfc2qt -- create-dialog-list TortoiseProcENG.rc tortoise_proc_dialog.list This will extract all Dialog IDD's and save them in the file tortoise_proc_dialog.list. The developer will have to edit tortoise_proc.list and must define a class name for every dialog. * mfc2qt --create-control-list TortoiseProcENG.rc tortoise_proc_control.list This will extract the type of all controls used in all dialogs. The developer must define the qt replacements for all all non standard guy elements (e.g scintilla) * mfc2qt --convert-dialogs -d tortoise_proc_dialog.list -c tortoise_proc_control.list ./qtui
mfc2qt must provide some templates for the source code generation.
After all Dialogs are converted, they must be edited:
* Place gui elements in layouts * Correct conversion errors. * ...
In the next step the existing source code must be added/ported to the new class files. Since QT support much more powerful controls like Model/view, signal/slots etc, developers must think about a better way to represent the data in the GUI.
* [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/tortoisegit-dev/FKwoflxEEVk Dev Group - TortoiseGit QT?] * #Issue 2203
... to be continued