Proposal to plan for "Milestone Releases" on the way to KDE4

[Andras Mantia]

On Thursday 26 January 2006 01:40, Alexander Dymo wrote:
> But I have my own experience that tells me that KDevelop is usually
> not a best tool for my development tasks. It's a cool IDE, but not
> for me. Wtf? I participated in its development, I implemented many
> things and now I don't use it much. This question bothers me every
> day and I'm going to get an answer from myself at the first place.

Ok, I think we need a supporting mail as well. I use KDevelop almost 
exclusively to develop anything for KDE, ever since KDevelop 2 which 
was way inferior to the current one. I only use Kate or mcedit (hi 
Ossi) when I have to quickly patch something which I usually do not 
work on. For your own application I find KDevelop to be quite good, 
altough it has several problems:
- it is hard to set up when your application is together with other 
applications in a module
- the automake manager has quite some problems
- the UI is somewhat cluttered
- the debugger wants to do some things on his own
- in the standard mode there is no split view (and no, the mode which 
has is not that good for me)
- compilation inside is slower due to the compiler output filtering
- from time to time it has problems with the code completion (mainly 
because of BDB)
- it is hard to use/set up for library developing 
- feels unfinished in lot of places

But these are things that can be and should be improved and they are not 
something that is very hard to solve, at least part of them. And it has 
quite some strengths and pros compared to other editors:
- it can be learned easily (yes, this comes from Kate), compared to vim 
or emacs. 
- syntax highlighting is good (again, thanks to Kate)
- it can be used both with the mouse (after all its a GUI application), 
and for the basic tasks with the keyboard as well. Keyboard handling 
needs to be improved though
- the integrated debugger is very handy
- the code completion and the integrated help system helps a lot
- for me it saves a lot of time that I could do everything from inside 
one application

I find an invaluable tool and I'm sure it is for many others, especially 
those who were not Unix/Linux hackers before switching to KDE. And I 
think here is the problem and the small adoption of KDevelop (and for 
that matter Kate) inside the "core" KDE developers: they are many times 
long time Linux users before the modern Linux desktops appeared and 
they are so accustomed with their command line (or similar, but with 
the same idea behind) tools, that it is hard for them to switch to a 
completely new style. This is understandable, but there is always a 
but: why do we create a GUI desktop and applications than? So give it a 
try and use from time to time our own applications, maybe you will find 
the good in them and will help to improve them. Your ideas and 
experience from other fields could help a lot existing KDE 
applications, and as you are almost all developers, in this case it 
could help KDevelop and Kate as an editor.

Andras
-- 
Quanta Plus developer - http://quanta.kdewebdev.org
K Desktop Environment - http://www.kde.org
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