Let's discuss KDevelop4 interfaces and shell

[Roberto Raggi]

Hi

On Friday 19 January 2007 11:30, Richard Dale wrote:
> other over-ambitous developments. Bernd Gehrmann replaced it with gideon
> which was stripped down to just the minimal plugin architecture to get
> started, with no excess abstractions that would only be used in the future.
Gideon was an amazing hack. I remember a few things about it

 1) libkdevelop_interfaces was very easy to understand. Few classes, 6-7 
classes, with *NO CODE*

 2) interesting util libraries (e.g the project library, or the sourceinfo 
repository)

 3) the UI was awful (a KWrite based text editor, a few views and a bunch of 
splitters).

 4) at that time we had a pretty successiful IDE (KDevelop2), so no one was 
interested in making Gideon/KDevelop3 usable :-)

So, what was great about it? Well, the core platform (because gideon was a 
platform) was *small* and *easy* to understand. Thanks to the great platform 
we had we were able to replace everything without breaking too much the 
design. I really would like you guys to read a bit about gideon, kdevelop2, 
kdevelop2/gideon integration, and so on.. my feeling is we are having exactly 
the same problems we had in the old days. I'm not happy with the status of 
KDevelop4. I don't know if I'm the only one, but when I look at KDevelop4 I 
don't think it will have a great future.

The story

Gideon/KDevelop3 was dying (The day I have almost killed KDevelop3)

kdevelop & gideon's parts
http://lists.kde.org/?t=101715106900001&r=1&w=2

Crisis of a marriage? 
http://lists.kde.org/?t=101717724400002&r=1&w=2

The day of seperation is here 
http://lists.kde.org/?t=101718028900005&r=1&w=2

more or less at the same time Matthias introduced IDEAl (this was awesome)
http://lists.kde.org/?t=101717155500003&r=1&w=2

Gideon was cool again :-) There was no point to continue to work on KDEVELOP_2
(and/or KDEVELOP_2_2) branch. Thanks to its modern architecture, and awesome 
UI Gideon was interesting (again).

In less than 6 months, Gideon got
 - new language framework
 - a new code model
 - modern class browser with 3 different UI modes
 - persistant class store
 - quick searching
 - and a lot of new stuff..

and we did all this cool hacks without breaking the KDevelop 
library(libkdevelop.la).

I really don't think we can do the same in /trunk. KDevelop4 is huge (about 
200.000 loc). It doesn't have usable UI. It already has support for 4 
programming languages and 4 project managers.

ciao robe

-- 
Roberto Raggi - roberto at kdevelop.org
KDevelop http://www.kdevelop.org