Step by step

Over the last few months I’ve worked on a new monotone interface for guitone from time to time. This new interface supersedes the old one in a couple of aspects; the most important one is that it runs the monotone processes in separate QThreads instead of the main GUI thread. I hope this will make many unexplainable locking problems on Mac OS X and Win32 vanish, which especially pop up when starting the application up or – weird enough – when the application is run as non-root user (Win32).

Rewriting something so important almost from the scratch is very tedious. Since it basically affects the whole application, the head of the net.venge.monotone.guitone branch has been and probably will be broken for a while. This is actually the first time I appreciated the fact that you can compile single source files step by step with make, just by triggering `make target_dir/filename.o`, so I’m kind of proud to say that I already have the actual thread class, a task item and a thread manager working (i.e. they compile ;)) – and I just finished the new utility class which supports synchronous queries to the thread (with the help of QEventLoop), which otherwise has a pure async i/o.

Sure, there is still a lot of work left and this work could be done faster if I wouldn’t be the only one right now hacking on this project (*wink*, *wink*, want to join?) – but at least I have the feeling that I’m getting somewhere now. And maybe I get even more impressions how to do things _better_ if I come back from the Trolltech Developer Days 2007 in Munich (16th and 17th October), whose attendance is sponsored by my company and Trolltech themselves.

Yes, thats right, they invited me to go there for free; a normal entry would have cost me nearly 600 Euro! And all this just because I develop this nice little Open Source application named guitone – isn’t that great?!