and idea for the development of Scipad

[François Vogel]

Hi all,

After having discussed Torbjørn's proposal first on the dev list, we 
followed up off the dev list and Torbjørn sent me a piece of code to 
begin integration with Scipad.

Now is time to sum it all up I think.


Torbjørn Pettersen said on 01/10/2008 15:57:
> fvogelnew1 at free.fr skrev:
>> I can offer to do it for you if you send me your current files.
>>   
> That is an offer I will not turn down :-)

I started from the code you provided. I have now a working solution 
but I didn't commit yet because of licensing issues (see details below).

For your information I modified what you sent me in the following ways:

1. Changed the shortcut in the file menu since letter c is already 
used for the Close command. I selected letter d since actually there 
is no other choice left in that menu.

2. Updated localization for the French language.

3. Factorized proc helpskeleton and proc helpfromsci into a common 
proc createhelpfile {whatkind}


4. About making this work with files located anywhere on the disk, and 
even files not yet saved.
As said in previous emails, this can indeed be done and I have an 
implementation for this.
However, this implementation required non negligible gymnastics to 
make everything transparent to the user and not letting a temporary 
leftover file on disk.
Nevertheless, I think it's now working and reasonably clean.


Now the real issue I see:

5. I have placed help_from_sci.sci in SCI/modules/helptools/macros and 
the corresponding help file in SCI/modules/helptools/help/en_US
I really believe this function belongs to the help module rather than 
to the Scipad module.

However, this poses a problem with respect to the license. You have 
selected GPL for your files, but the help module is licensed under the 
Cecill license. I don't know whether it's possible to add a GPL'ed 
macro inside a Cecill module.

----> *Opteam, please advise on this.*

Fallback solution #1: I could integrate your help_from_sci.* files in 
the Scipad module, which is GPL. But as said above I really think that 
functionally speaking they belong to the help module.

Fallback solution #2: Would you be willing to change the license of 
your files to the Cecill license?

Side note: since your function help_from_sci is going to be integrated 
in Scilab itself, I think removing it from your toolbox would be good.

Currently I think the only remaining issue before committing in trunk 
is the license. For this I need your comments and the opteam statement 
as well.

Thanks,
Francois