This page is kept for historical purposes only. Please see the home page for my current situation. —Luca Saiu.

DLL: TP 5 - Development

Since I've not seen much recent activity on the mailing list, you can use this session to work on the easy tasks which are still not finished; or, if you are more ambitious, you can start the advanced task I've described in class today.

You will be quite free to work on what you like today, and to ask me questions.

By the way, please don't ask me again what the project is all about: there's a whole page about it, and I have explained it again in the mailing list (even in French). If you haven't started yet, start as soon as possible.

When you work at the Institut Galilée labs, before starting, you have to execute the following line on every terminal you use:

source ~10706282/add-prefix ~10706282/usr
That is for using the software I have installed in my home directory on the machines at Institut Galilée; I don't have administrator privileges on the lab machines, so I have installed everything in my home directory.

Of course you don't need to do anything similar at home if you have installed everything correctly, because you are the administrator of your own machines.


If you haven't yet enabled history support for Guile (for example, pressing the "up arrow" key should let you see and edit the last line you typed), you can copy my Guile configuration file which enables it:

cp ~10706282/.guile ~
You only need to do that once. If you want to enable history at home (strongly recommended), you can create a file ~/.guile containing the two lines:
(use-modules (ice-9 readline))
(activate-readline)

You can find some practical suggestions at the bottom of the first TP page.



Task A: finish color support

Mr Jordan PIRES already did most of the work on fixing bug 29, but his modifications are relative to an old version of the code and have some cosmetic problems. Adapt his changes (you have received them via the mailing list) to the new version, or rewrite them from scratch.

This is quite easy to do in three hours. Call me when you're done; when the first good version is ready we will commit it to the official repo for everybody to use.


Task B: Investigate Guile-SDL

Thien-Thi Nguyen maintains Guile-SDL (originally written by others), a Guile binding for the SDL graphic library.

Can we easily use it with our setup? I've not tried. You can try yourself to make it work, using a private prefix of yours as we did in last TP and also my prefix (in other words, you also have to run the red line above).

You will probably need to install SDL and other related library such as SDL_ttf into your own prefix; I've alrady done that in the past on the Institut Galilée machines, so I know that at least that part works without issues.

Try configuring, compiling and testing the library. It would be nice to optionally support it (see bug 55).

Also look for Guile-SDL Demos.


Task C: turtle graphics by heuristic searching

Start working on the big ambitious task I've described in class today. Somebody should also submit bugs in bugzilla for the intermediate tasks; please talk with the other students in order to avoid duplicates and submit each task only once.



Notes for myself, in case of problems with the SERCAL installation or with student accounts:
My id is 10706282 .



Back to my home page...


Luca Saiu
Last modified: 2012-01-11
Copyright © 2010,2011,2012 Luca Saiu
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