KDevelop4 features (Was: change of maintainership in KDevelop)

[Vladimir Prus]

On Tuesday 04 April 2006 12:32, Richard Dale wrote:

> > I would very much like to do to a recruitment drive, but I'd like to have
> > things a bit more organized and also perhaps be able to provide better
> > information on how to write new plugins or new language support parts,
> > etc.
>
> Yes you're right, until the framework exists and is documented then extra
> people won't make much difference anyway. Maybe I sound a bit too
> pessimistic above.

I think the most important thing for KDevelop 4 is to come up with new cool 
features. Everything else is secondary, and in fact, the cool new features 
can be implemented in vanilla Qt4 if some framework is not yet ready. And 
cool features is what can potentially attract new developers, given proper 
publicity. 

Personally, I think that KDevelop is pretty bad when it comes to real-world 
use-cases. For example, I'm just now looking at Eclipse's code in Eclipse, 
and going to class declaration with one click, and going to list of all uses 
of a method in one click are both extremely handy, and missing in KDevelop.

For another example, consider the use-case of applying a patch. Ideally, 
KDevelop should be able to guide a developer from receiving of email, to 
applying, resolving conflicts, building, testing, and comitting (including 
auto-composing the list of changed functions for commit log). 

Or consider SVN integration. Ideally, I want to select "Annotate" command 
somewhere and see revision numbers on the left of the edited text, with all 
revision numbers clickable and leading to log message for that revision and 
full diff for that revision.

And so on. It would be good if we collect all such ideas and put it to Wiki.

Maybe of ideas can be implemented right away, with Qt4, or maybe with reliance 
just on Kate. That's probably be a good way to attract new developers.

- Volodya