Project Management View ideas

[David Nolden]

On Friday 09 November 2007 12:10:19 Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> > 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".
>
> Doesn't scale well, especially when allowing to select individual
> folders/targets. The checkboxes allow to easily see where builds are
> happening, with the tristate-thing (i.e. grey checkbox if not all
> subitems are going to be built)

Checkboxes might be ok too, but personally I would prefer if I could see 
easily what exact actions I'm triggering with a build, without needing to 
search the tree.

Another question: How to exactly determine the build-order of checked items?

Currently I usually do something like this when building:
Make -C ../../kdevplatform && sudo make -C ../../kdevplatform install && 
make -C .. && sudo make -C .. install

Which could be nicely represented by some kind of action-list, that could 
contain "build kdevplatform, install kdevplatform, build 
kdevelop/languages/cpp, install kdevelop/languages/cpp". If one item in the 
action-list would fail, the following would not be executed, similar to the 
kdesvn-build script.

I think it would be great if we could provide something like this.
An additional great feature would be allowing to add custom commands to the 
build-list, to fit all the custom build needs out there. :)

Such a build-list could be synced with the checkboxes in the project tree.

So here a proposal inspired by the above thoughts:
- Have an additional small build-list widget, maybe in the same dock with the 
project-manager, that can contain a list of actions.
- Synchronize project-view and build-list
-   When you check an item in the project-view for build, add it to the list.
-   When you uncheck an item in the project-view, remove it from the list.
-   When removing an item from the build-list, uncheck it in the project-view.
- Allow dragging around items in the list to change the build-order.
- Allow inserting custom command-actions into the list, the output can be 
shown in the application-output view.
- When a build is triggered, execute all the actions in the build-list in 
order, and show the progress by adding green checkmarks to successfully 
processed items.
- When an item fails, add a red cross to it, and stop building.
- When clicking an item in the list, show the output.

Since we anyway need a way of tracking the progress while building multiple 
targets, this might be a nice way.

greetings, David