The future of gideon

[John Firebaugh]

Hi Everybody,

About a month ago, there was a huge discussion about the future of 
kdevelop/gideon. My opinion on the matter was that so much work has gone into 
kdevelop, and gideon was so incomplete, that we should continue from the 
kdevelop codebase. Since then however, most of the currently active 
developers, including myself, have been working instead on gideon, and it has 
improved dramatically. I'm really pleased with the point gideon is at now -- 
except for a few issues*, it's actually quite usable for everyday 
development. In particular, the IDEA UI is just awesome, and with some work, 
code-completion (combined with pre-parsing of qt-copy and kdelibs) will make 
KDE development 10x easier (and more fun!).

Those who thought gideon was just unusable before, I really encourage you to 
cvs up and try it out. Of course, I can not force anyone to work on the 
kdevelop codebase, but I myself am now commited to it, and I encourage 
everyone else to do so as well. To see this project totally unified would be 
a wonderful thing. :)

That said, I hope we can discuss some of the following concerning gideon.

-- Code Completion --

Well, now that kate doesn't pop up the completion box right over the text, 
it's quite nice. :) As discussed before, to be really powerful requires an 
embedded parser. Unfortunately, C++ is very difficult to parse. I did a bit 
of searching on the subject and found some useful info like:

http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~adb/compilers/cplusplus.html

And a post from Eray to the sourcenav mailing list, with promising responses:

http://sources.redhat.com/ml/sourcenav/2002-q1/msg00023.html

Eray, what is the status of making an API out of sourcenav? Robe, and others 
working/thinking about such things: what are your thoughts? Personally, I 
think we must find or join forces with others who have working C++ parsers or 
who follow similar goals. Sourcenav looks promising in this respect.

-- Debugging --

Seems like debugging for c/c++ is totally broken. Some konsole window pops up, 
and then nothing.

-- Polish --

The main area where gideon is lacking is polish. There are lots of things that 
don't work quite right. For example:

List views should obey KDE preference for single/double click.
Capitalization and wording of GUI items.
Menu items for show/hide of views and toolbars.
No toolbar or keybinding config.
Layout of config dialogs.
Conflicting key bindings.
Save/restoration of _all_ aspects of environment (open views, windows, their 
geometries, etc.)

Mostly, fixing them is trivial, though maybe not as enjoyable as writing new 
features. Nevertheless, I would encourage everybody to work on polishing 
rather than new features/plugins, especially if we want to try to release 
gideon as the next kdevelop.

Happy Coding to All,
-John

*) Here's the list. Anyone want to fix these? :)
- Kate's vertical scrollbar is never shown in MDI mode.
- Projects should store open files when closing and reopen them when restored.
- Closing a project does not close open views (in either mode).
- The menus get messed up when switching between editor views (also seen in 
kate).