The Technical Working Group's mission statement

[R.F. Pels]

On Wednesday 15 March 2006 18.00, Alexander Neundorf wrote:

>> - there is no widespread cmake experience under KDE developers
>
> Yes, now after two months. How is this different to the situation with
> autotools after years ? ;-)

I am in fact /also/ referring to application developers. I'm aware that core 
developers can be a different breed. I really /do/ think KDE can and should 
be an attractive framework to program against in addition to being a nice 
environment to program in. And that, IMHO, /mandates/ that there is a 
development environment available that combines project management with the 
underlying buildsystem 

> With autotools there was no support other than having to create the project
> yourself. With cmake you can get the projects automatically.

It is possible to go from cmake to kdevelop projects, true, but /not/ the 
other way around.

>> - kdevelop maintainers do not have time to add reasonable cmake support
>>   in short notice
>
> Depends on your definition of reasonable. I never met even one KDE
> developer who used kdevelop to work on kde modules in the past. The
> situation is now with the current cmake support in kdevelop/kdevelop
> support in cmake *much* better.

As stated before. Reasonable IMHO is providing a project manager that can 
generate the proper cmake files and give a similar overview as the project 
manager that could manipulate automake files. As I said, core developers are 
one of the groups that are the target audience for kdevelop. Application 
developers - and especially those that are accustomed to what they encounter 
in Windows - are the people that will benefit from the project manager 
feature the most and I think that such a feature is absolutely indispensible 
to create the IMHO necessary attractiveness of developing for KDE4.

> So, the main taks of an IDE is setting up linker and compile flags ? I
> don't think so.

See the above reaction regarding project management. No. I don't think that 
that is the main task of an IDE. I think an IDE should provide a combination 
of file handling, documentation, tools and last-but-not-least project 
management that integrates with - in the case of KDE4 - cmake in a 
meaningfull way. And I think a meaningfull way is two-way exchange like what 
can be done with automake currently. 

-- 
R.F. Pels,  3e Rompert 118,  5233 AL  's-Hertogenbosch,  The Netherlands
+31736414590        ruurd at tiscali.nl       http://home.tiscali.nl/~ruurd