Suggestions for NPM

[Adam Treat]

Hello,

I have put together a little demonstration of how I'd like to see the New 
Project Manager (NPM) interfaces work out.  I have a Umbrello XMI file which 
displays a little schema of what I'm thinking of as well as a designer ui 
file for a generic options widget I'd like to see adopted.  Oh, and I have 
png's of all this available here:  

http://www.mit.edu/~manyoso/kdevelop/NPM/

Ok, so here goes...  I think the builder specific stuff should be broken out 
like so:

1. Importers -- plugins that parse specific build tool makefiles
2. Builders -- plugins that control the options for specific build tools
3. Exporters -- plugins that write specific build tool makefiles
4. ProjectEditors -- plugins that are language specific and control which 
importers, exporters and builders you can use.

Now, Roberto already has this worked out for the most part.  The one piece 
that seems to be missing is the exporters which are right now folded into the 
builders.  Of course, the builder should be dependant upon the exporter ... 
as we'd have to write the specific makefiles to disk before we could use a 
build tool (if we hadn't already), but breaking them out allows us to 
explicitely choose to convert from one build tool paradigm to another if we 
like.  ie, going from Automake to QMake or vice versa.

One thing that this scheme implies is that we'd either have to limit the 
buildtools to a common subset of functionality or deal with potential loss of 
configuration going from a very rich build environment (Automake) to ... 
well, just about anything else.

http://www.mit.edu/~manyoso/kdevelop/NPM/

Cheers,

Adam