Review Request/New Framework: KF5::SyntaxHighlighting

[Dominik Haumann]

Hi Volker,

thanks for this initiative!

On Sat, Sep 10, 2016 at 5:47 PM, Volker Krause <vkrause at kde.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> please review KF5::SyntaxHighlighting (syntax-highlighting in Git) for
> becoming a framework :)
>
> This is a tier1/functional version of the Kate syntax highlighting engine.
> It's not tied to a particular output format or editor engine, the interface is
> basically just passing in a line of text and getting back a set of formatting
> instructions. A QSyntaxHighlighter and a HTML CLI highlighter are included,
> for example.
>
> Use Cases
>
> - I initially started this for use in GammaRay's QRC browser (which can embed
> into QtCreator, making using the KXmlGui-dependent Kate part problematic)
> - It's already used in KDAB's internal QML-based training presentation tool
> - Kate, obviously (see below)
> - possibly replacing a few hand-written highlighters in KDE PIM (Sieve,
> message source, diff attachments), and enabling inline attachment highlighting
> - the Kate team apparently also had some demand for this in the past, e.g. for
> use in CLI tools
>
> Relation to Kate
>
> I showed my work on this to the Kate team at Akademy, originally to get help
> regarding some semantic corner cases in the highlighting files, however the
> feedback I got was a plan to turn this into a framework, and a migration
> strategy for Kate, therefore the recent activity into that direction :)
>
> The migration would happen in small steps, the first one being Kate switching
> to use the syntax definition files from the new library, as well as the
> indexing and meta data loading code. More features would follow in the
> subsequent releases, together with making the corresponding API officially
> public. Future steps might include syncing the format/theme settings,
> determining which syntax to use for a given file, and of course the ultimately
> switching the entire syntax highlighting related code over to the new library.
>
> For this all to start, we'd need an initial KF5::SyntaxHighlighting release
> first though, to not have KTextEditor depend on something unreleased.


>From what I can see, the progress so far looks very promising,
especially since you seem to be using this already in several places.
:-)

As you noted, the most important part is how to process. The idea of
having an initial release in KDE Frameworks is fine, I would suggest
that we need to agree the API is ok as is by then, and the API
documentation is good [enough].

I already added some API docs, but the next days I can also look into
the public interfaces again to see whether all makes sense from a
KTextEditor perspective.

Best,
Dominik