Debriefing from a long winded irc chat

[Milian Wolff]

Andrew Manson, 10.10.2009:
> 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.

Long mail, phew :)

I haven't had a look at your plugin, but at least I can say the following:

1) It should be easily possible to create new user-defined project templates 
from inside kdevelop. it would probably the best to have a button "save this 
project as template", where every occurence of the project's name gets 
replaced by the proper placeholder etc.

2) these templates should be stored somewhere in 
~/.kde/share/apps/ktemplatexyz (dunno how that app was called). but afaik 
that's already possible, no?

3) GHNS integration!! i.e. store the templates on kde-files.org
-- 
Milian Wolff
mail at milianw.de
http://milianw.de
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