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Welcome to the qcircuit wiki! This page may hopefully provide some explanation of the direction we wish the qcircuit work to go in.

Future Work

Where We Are

Currently, our work involves simply taking the files already generated by Steve Flammia and Bryan Eastin and putting them into this repository.

As far as the software goes, this tex file must be manually inserted by the user into their local TeX tree. This is undesirable in several aspects, the first of which is that any updates to qcircuit are not automatically propagated to the user. Furthermore, a lack of standardized download and install can hinder the use and adoption of qcircuit -- software should ``just work''.

Where We Could Go

One obvious direction we could do is to make qcircuit into a bona fide LaTeX package. Then, users would simply need to use the command \usepackage{qcircuit} to be able to draw circuits. From a development standpoint, this addresses the issue described above, and so is a rather desirable feature.

Another, perhaps very ambitious, direction, is to update qcircuit to be compatible with current LaTeX drawing packages. In particular, the TikZ package has emerged as a helpful way to do drawing; making qcircuit compatible with that would enable further development down the line.

Workflow Management

This repository has three main branches: master, dev, and pack. The master branch is, as the name suggests, the most stable branch. The dev branch serves as a stop before the master branch. Changes should be committed to the dev branch first, and then, upon verifying few things break (can never get rid of all of them!), the dev branch can be merged into master. Currently, I am using the pack branch for the purposes of addressing the suggestion above of making qcircuit into a full-fledged LaTeX package.