Project Management View ideas

[David Nolden]

On Thursday 08 November 2007 01:06:27 Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> Hi,
>
> so the remove-the-splitview idea was torn down with pretty good
> arguments :)
>
> Thus I'd like to present a more complete vision of how the project
> management view could be in KDevelop4.
>
> - Showing buildsystem and non-buildsystem files, that is the project
>   model will get new item types for this. I'm not sure yet how to
>   populate those
>
> - Allowing to "remove" individual files/folders from project view (i.e.
>   marking as ignore)?
>
> - colorization/extra information from vcs interfaces (long term)

I think it would be great if we could get some additional colorization/icons 
from the duchain(show the parsing-progress), and maybe from teamwork.

> About the split-view:
>
> - optionally show a detail view, if certain types of items are selected
>   in the overview
>   * if folder is selected show targetlist from folder+subfolders
>   * if target is selected show filelist
>
> The splitview could then get some special actions in it, like
> adding/removing files to/from a target if a target is selected. Or
> building/installing all targets that are shown if a folder is selected
> (and thus all targets in it are shown). But I don't want to add anything
> that will be duplicated on the toolbar.

That sounds good. We can decide later what exact actions we want there.

> About main menubar/toolbar: I was thinking we could do something similar
> as Eclipse has for running apps. That is we have a menu item "Build..."
> that opens a dialog with checkable project/targets tree hierarchy (no
> deep nesting, just plain list) to select what to build. Then we'd have
> both a menu item and a toolbar item "Recent Builds" which contain
> something like the last 5 builds to re-run them. Same thing for install
> and clean. And these are perfect candidates for the keyboard shortcuts,
> so you can easily re-run the last build of your project/target
> combination.

I haven't used eclipse seriously. This does sound a little complicated, and 
for example if you have opened the projects "kdebase" and "kdelibs" how 
should the hundreds of targets be represented in that list?

What about this:
We could introduce something like a build-list. In the project-view, you could 
have a context-menu action and a split-view button "Add to build-list".
The "Build" menu would show you that build-list, so the "Build" entry would be 
called "Build kdesupport, kdelibs, kdevplatform, kdevelop", and there would 
be an entry "Clear build list".
Additionally the project-view and split-view could contain a 
button "Quickbuild", that simply builds the selected target without using a 
build-list.

Previous build-lists/quickbuilds could be accessible through the "Recent 
Builds" as you proposed.

The advantage would be:
- Scalable(no big list of targets)
- Natural way of specifying the build-order

Should we ever implement that feature, we could even represent the build-lists 
by working-sets, and thereby store them to disk. :)

greetings, David