KDevelop4 features (Was: change of maintainership in KDevelop)

[Hamish Rodda]

On Tuesday 04 April 2006 18:48, Vladimir Prus wrote:
> 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.

Whenever you want to switch your debugger work to kdevelop4, I'm ready to help 
you get some stunning results for the debugger <-> editor integration :)  I 
did have a debugger port (only took about an hour) but it was going to suffer 
bitrot so we removed it for now.  Perhaps when MI is stable?

> 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).

I want to provide external tool inlining which should help kate be 
integratable into kdiff and friends, and then hopefully this will be better.

> 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.

Ditto.  I also think we need to use libsvncpp if it's mature, to get the 
benefits of being able to use the local .svn directory.

> 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.

We really need a kick-ass c++ support part to do all this, and it's currently 
awaiting solid parser support.  Roberto is working on this, so I'm 
optimistic.

Time will tell...

Cheers,
Hamish.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 191 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kdevelop-devel/attachments/20060405/2498fa21/attachment.sig>