Project Management View ideas

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 13.11.07 18:41:49, David Nolden wrote:
> 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

Just dropped that idea :)

> 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.

Ok, there's one thing I'm not sure about yet: 

1 Buildset or multiple Buildsets? I mean does it make sense to keep a
list of targets/folders/files around that you currently don't build, but
switch often enough that manually readding the items is too much a pain? 

If we decide for multiple buildsets, I'd like to have something similar
to the current fileview, i.e. first it shows the buildsets, then you
"open" one and it shows the contents. With easy navigation back and no
tree hierarchy.

> 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.

It currently has a list of items to build. In fact thats all thats
really needed - IMHO. Currently adding/removing is manual, but I'm
planning to add drag'n'drop support sooner or later. Also it currently
isnt' stored, but that'll get fixed as soon as I find out whats wrong
with my getFolder() method.

However that leads to another question: 
Where to store the buildset? I think it should be stored in kdevelops
configuration as its cross-project and thus as soon as you close the
project where its stored it'll disappear.

> - Allow dragging around items in the list to change the build-order.

I'll first add up/down arrows, but yes that'll come with the other dnd
support. Though I'm not yet sure how to do this with inter-project deps,
which I'd like to add to KDevelop4. 

> - Allow inserting custom command-actions into the list, the output can be 
> shown in the application-output view.

No this is not needed at all, or rather: We already can have that
without having any special custom commands. All thats needed is a
GenericBuildSystemManager which allows to define the commands run for
build(), install() and Co. Then the items created by this custom manager
can be used the same as other items in the buildlist.

> - 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.

That latter is a nice idea, shouldn't be too hard to add.

> - When clicking an item in the list, show the output.

That might be problematic, as the projectmanagementview doesn't know
anything about where the output for a build goes to. The only way I see
that this could work would be by exposing the whole Buildset stuff via
an interface/API.

Andreas

-- 
You have had a long-term stimulation relative to business.