KDev4 SDK Single or Multiple Projects?

[Jens Dagerbo]

On 1/31/07, Andreas Pakulat <apaku at gmx.de> wrote:
> On 30.01.07 20:46:00, Richard Dale wrote:
> > On Tuesday 30 January 2007, Matt Rogers wrote:
> > > On Jan 30, 2007, at 9:50 AM, Richard Dale wrote:
> > > > On Tuesday 30 January 2007, Jens Herden wrote:
> > > >> But what I would like to have is more than one language in one
> > > >> project. So
> > > >> that we could mix HTML and PHP and Ruby in one project together and
> > > >> KDevelop will load all the language support plugins together. This
> > > >> might be
> > > >> tricky because you would want to hide/show plugins according to
> > > >> the current
> > > >> language your document belongs to.
> > > >
> > > > Yes, this is more important to me than being able to open two
> > > > projects at
> > > > once. I personally think that is more trouble than it's worth and
> > > > don't
> > > > really see the point.
> > >
> > > Why do you think that? What can you provide to back up your statement
> > > that it "is more trouble than it's worth"?
> > >
> > > So far, the arguments against multiple projects is unconvincing.
> > You can start multiple copies of KDevelop for each project, and I don't see
> > why we need to have a single KDevelop application 'pretending' to do the same
> > thing. What is it that you can do within a single instance of KDevelop that
> > you couldn't do with multiple instances, one per project?
>
> A "build-all-projects" feature comes to mind, along with a way to define
> the build order of the opened projects (and no this is not another
> buildsystem).

For me, this is the *only* thing that comes to mind, and that alone
isn't a good enough reason, imho. Multiple project support will
without a doubt give us additional complexity. What actual real world
utility do we gain from it that makes it worth it? I'm unconvinced, so
far.

Note also that some "related projects" actually become *harder* to
work with within the same IDE instance. For example: a client/server
system communicating via some IPC system.. how would you debug both
client and server within one IDE instance? Multiple simultaneous
debugging sessions?

Having more than one language support system loaded at a time could be
a good thing. Different languages often use different build systems,
however, and by the time we support multiple build systems within one
project.. we probably have everything multiple projects need anyway.


> Also I'm not sure what type of system you have but on my laptop
> switching between 2 kdevelop instances is considerably slower than
> opening another file in an already running instance.

Wow, you must be short on memory!

Also, the relevant thing with reference to "speed" is if switching
between two project in one app instance would be faster than switching
between two app instance mainwindows. If anything beyond the most
trival state needs to be changed, I'm betting a mainwindow switch is
faster...


// jens