KDevelop 4.0 development

[David Nolden]

On Monday 25 February 2008 22:53:52 Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> As far as screenshots are concerned: Check my blog at
> apaku.wordpress.com, the posts with shots are relatively old but there's
> not that much that changed meanwhile.
>
> About a release: I'm not sure that makes sense yet. I didn't test for 2
> or 3 weeks, but the c++ support/editor was quite crashy back then. We
> only have very basic project support. there are about 3 or 4 plugins
> that are already quite far and thats it. Some API's still need actual
> code that uses them to get done right.

C++ support is coming along nicely, but it needs some UI refinement, hammering 
out some bugs, and a persistent du-chain before it can really become useful. 
Fortunately Kris Wrong has written a mail last weekend that he wants to start 
on the persistent du-chain.

When it comes to code-understanding, the C++ support is very good already as 
long as the include-paths are resolved correctly, my last tests all went 
surprisingly well. But there is some obvious bugs about document-highlighting 
within kate, and those will have to wait until the hackathon when hamish will 
have time again.

So to sum things up: The C++ support should be very usable and helpful in a 
few weeks/months, but not yet.

> I know its "release early release often", but I'd like to have an
> application that we developers can use on a somewhat regular base before
> giving it to a wider audience. Especially as we might have to deal with
> a lot of "this is utter crap" messages and thats quite disastrous to
> developers motivation most of the time.
> Given that the hackathon isn't that far away, we could think about
> scheduling an alpha release 2 or 3 weeks after that (after the dust
> settled ;) ).

I agree to this. I don't think we will attract any new developers by releasing 
KDevelop4 in its current state. Given that the C++ support is moving 
forwards, what I'm a most worried about is the whole UI framework that should 
glue it all together. After the hackathon sounds like a good target for a 
usable version.

> BTW: In case you've got your calendar open and have the deadlines for
> KDE 4.1 in there, yeap I don't think we can make it for that release -
> at least not if we do the same as the rest of KDE did for 4.0 and
> personally I don't want that.

Maybe we can release a beta at the time of KDE 4.1. I think C++ support will 
be good by then. We surely won't be able to deliver something 
feature-complete(compared to kdev3), but something that people will like to 
use, with big advantages over kdevelop-3 or a simple text-editor, and from 
then on kdevelop might start becoming more attractive to developers again.

Greetings, David