gideon general evaluation

[Jean Pierre Charalambos]

Hello all,

I am new here in the lists. I've working with Qt/KDE using kdevelop since
some time ago. Now I am writting an article about developping using
kdevelop and I want to include some comments about "gideon". Here are some
of them. I hope they can be useful to you in some way.

1. Very nice work! thanks!
2. Plugin parts
Does the kparts idea allow us to plug-in new project templates to kdevelop? If 
that is the case maybe it would be the key to allow kdevelop to become a more 
general developping framework. How about to open a new branch to include 
support for Qt# projects?
3. Makefiles
I have found in previous versions of kdevelop this to be its most obscure
item. I have always been able to add a new file to a project, but removing
it was another history and almost have never worked for me. At the other hand,
adding many files "at once" was not possible. It seems gideon is taking away 
all of this with its new concept: the automaker manager. I have try it by 
implementing a very short kde app. I dit it in the following steps:
a. In the wizard I decided to use a c++ (simple hello world program) since a
very short kde app is not part of the preconfigured template projects.
By the way, I think I found a bug: the only parent directory for new projects
seems to be $HOME_DIR.
b. I begin to add my *.h and *.cpp to the src. dir and to include them: that
was ok and intuitively.
c. Adding a new subproject was also completely straightforward, but deletion
of it doesn't. I was not able to remove a newly created subproject.
(talking about the kde app templates: I still don't get the whole idea of the 
new dir tree. It would be nice to add some "help" at the corresponding pop-up 
edition dialogs).
d. Finally, I was not able to link against the qt and kde libs (from
scratch). So I was not able to run my little app. I did not found how to
configure a file to install it at the host machine (this feature was supported 
with the properties dialog within kdevelop 2.x).
Suggestion: I like one of the ideas behind the wizard: to find very fine 
project templates. I also have learnt from them what functionality to hope in 
newly kde releases. But I think it is important to support very simple app. 
in an intuitively manner.
4. IDEAl
UI general new aspect was very nice and friendly. I found its space to be
optimized. By the way, which kde widget do you use for the IDEAl ui? a custom
widget?
5. GUI Misc
At start up the app does not load its previous final state.
The lowest area of the the "messages" part hides near its smallest size.

Cheers,

Jean Pierre Charalambos