[RFC] Transform workspace into session

[Jens Dagerbo]

On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 4:12 PM, Matt Rogers <mattr at kde.org> wrote:
> On Monday 30 June 2008 06:33:22 Hamish Rodda wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Monday 30 June 2008 08:17:58 Matt Rogers wrote:
>> > On Sunday 29 June 2008 15:23:52 Andreas Pakulat wrote:
>> > > Hi,
>> > >
>> > > at the kdevelop sprint we pretty much agreed that some "central" place
>> > > to store metadata is needed, so I implemented a "workspace" thing thats
>> > > part of our project tree model. However thinking about this, it doesn't
>> > > make too much sense there and it also introduces space-wasting in the
>> > > treeview.
>> > >
>> > > Now other apps in KDE have a concept of "session" which IMHO fits here
>> > > pretty well, we can assign a data-area to a session. So plugins that
>> > > still want to store some project-unrelated metadata (like teamwork for
>> > > example, or svn-plugin for repositories) can do it. Also looking at
>> > > kate this works pretty well, people not interested in it (like Alex)
>> > > can just tell KDevelop once on first startup to use the default session
>> > > and never ask again for session-choosing.
>> > >
>> > > What do others think? Should we(I) look at how Kate's doing it and
>> > > eventually try to move some code to kdelibs for 4.2 so we can share
>> > > code with kate (or else just copy)?
>> > >
>> > > Andreas
>> >
>> > I like the idea. I dislike Eclipse's notion of a workspace anyways.
>>
>> I like it too, though I don't really like the way kate asks at startup...
>> maybe we should just reopen the last session, and then the user can ask to
>> change sessions if they want (we should be able to do that pretty fast)
>>
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Hamish.
>
> Agreed.

Don't forget that the user will start multiple copies of KDevelop and
that they will expect KDevelop to handle X sessions (KDev3 never
managed the latter, which it caught quite some flak for) so that when
they log out with three KDevelops running they will be able to log
back in and get all three back with their respective "sessions"
restored. From what I've seen, Kate doesn't handle this well.

It really would be cool to have that working properly. I miss session
restore like crazy at work (windows 2000), it really is one of the
killer features of the *nix desktop.

Judging by how people where I work use Eclipse with their java
project, I imagine they'd go insane without a "named session" feature
(which is more or less what the eclipse workspace is) that remembers
their set of projects. Some people here have literary several dozen
projects loaded into the same workspace - clearly not something you'd
want to have to set up manually each time.


// jens