Debriefing from a long winded irc chat

[Andrew Manson]

Hi everyone!

First of all I would like to congratulate you all on a job well done. 
Kdevelop is a really impressive platform and, at least for my needs, it 
is fantastically easy to extend! It took me less than an hour ( with a 
lot of help from apol and milian ) to figure out how to create a custom 
project template and for it to be ready for me to start using. The 
reason why I'm here however is because I wanted to discuss with you all 
about what I've done and see if there is a better way to do it.

I've attached the file that I was working on today just in case anyone 
wanted to have a look, for a reference on what I'm about to describe. 
The motivation for my work today was to create a "pluggable" template 
for Kdevelop so that a user could install it without having to rebuild 
Kdevelop or do something crazy like make you guys ship the template with 
Kdevelop. In essence I wanted to know if there was a system for a 3rd 
party template concept, and it seems there is. What i've done is I've 
taken the structure of an already existing template and added a cmake 
file that called your kdevplatform_add_app_templates macro to make sure 
the template was built right. I was also working in the kde-develop user 
account as described in the techbase so by calling cmakekde the template 
was installed in the right place and I didn't need to worry about a thing.

This system is all well and good but I can see a few problems with it:
  1) I was thinking that having a cmake project designed to do nothing 
but build the template tar file was a bit much, apart from anything else 
I wonder if this process is even available on a windows machine as the 
macro builds a tar file. Although this is not a major point, it is just 
something I wanted to discuss... and I do see the benefits of having a 
macro do all the heavy lifting for someone.
  2)  I'm not sure if relying on the generated make files to install the 
template is such a good idea because distros can change the positions of 
where they install things ( that does happen yes? ) and then this method 
would not work.
  3) In my case this point did not matter but... when you get your brand 
new distro and everything is installed in the right place, including 
kdevelop, those installation folders are ( if your distro is in anyway 
safe ) going to be read only for normal users. what if a non root user 
wants to install a new kdevelop template? do they have to request their 
sysadmin to do it? would it not make sense to provide a way to have a 
user level template, something like a store of template files in the 
users .kde dir?
  4) for usability reasons would it also not make sense to have some 
sort of gui "Upload a template" button hidden somewhere in the configs?

I think that's the things that I wanted to ask. I'm going to blog about 
my experiences today, and hopefully some time in the near future ( once 
these questions are answered/discussed ) I will write a "how-to" in the 
techbase or something.

Cheers

~Andrew
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: KdevelopTemplate.tar
Type: application/x-tar
Size: 30720 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kdevelop-devel/attachments/20091010/5090b182/attachment.tar>