KDE/kdevplatform/shell

[David Nolden]

Am Montag 09 November 2009 23:48:34 schrieb Andreas Pakulat:
> On 09.11.09 23:02:49, David Nolden wrote:
> > Am Montag 09 November 2009 16:41:31 schrieb Andreas Pakulat:
> > > Right now session-switching works without closing/reopening kdevelop,
> > > as all it does is unloading plugins, closing projects and then loading
> > > plugins and projects from the new session. (oh and apparently also
> > > snippets are stored in the session as I just see)  One problem might be
> > > that a session is identified by a UUID not a name (it does have a name,
> > > but multiple sessions with the same name are possible).
> >
> >  Btw. I think we shouldn't expect users to give names to sessions, that's
> > too much management effort. They should just be named by their contained
> > projects, for example "kdelibs+kdevplatform+kdevelop".
> 
> I completely disagree, a Session is not just a random number of projects
> being loaded together. There are far more settings supposed to be stored
> in it so it may make sense to have two sessions for the same projects.
> 
> I don't think this is a burden, because frankly I still don't see this
> being used by any of the first-time users.

But what identifies a session? IMO it is the set of projects. Why should you 
have two sessions "kdelibs+kdevplatform+kdevelop"? If you find such a case, 
then that probably really is an extreme corner- case that we shouldn't 
optimize for. We can auto-name sessions like that, and give the user an option 
to rename his session if he likes.

We should make using sessions as simple as possible, and IMO it would be best 
to completely re-use the semantics of working-file-sets here, a session would 
be a set of projects which is automatically defined by the projects you open. 
I don't like it when sessions need to be 'explicitly' managed like workspaces 
in eclipse.

If we replace the 'Close all Projects' menu-item with a 'Close Session' menu 
item, then even every newbie user will automatically start using sessions 
intuitively if he has multiple unrelated projects.

>Do you think a submenu listing all known sessions (by name) to allow to
>quickly select a different one is needed? Or do you think the current
>dialog (Settings->Configure Sessions) is enough?

Yes exactly something like that.

The current dialog has a few problems:
- Hidden in 'Settings' menu (should go into 'Projects')
- Doesn't actually load sessions
- Requires too many clicks to activate a session (a submenu containing all 
sessions would be better at least for loading)

Greetings, David