Problems with new session support

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 27.01.10 22:56:28, David Nolden wrote:
> Am Mittwoch 27 Januar 2010 22:38:39 schrieb Andreas Pakulat:
> > On 27.01.10 22:12:39, David Nolden wrote:
> > > Well, on my work machine I have 3 sessions that don't have a name, and it
> > > is totally fine like that. What would I need a session name for, if the
> > > contained projects completely identify the session? We can leave the user
> > > alone with such unneeded overhead. "kdevplatform, kdevelop" identifies my
> > > kdevelop session perfectly.
> > 
> > The problem is that you can't start the session that way from the
> > commandline with the -s switch.
> > 
> > > We could also allow the user to pick a session using "kdevelop -s
> > > ProjectName" by contained projects if we want that option to always work.
> > 
> > That would force me to type much more letters on the commandline then a
> > short session name would. Or what happens if there's a session that has
> > two projects and another that has these two + a third one?
> Well, I think that is a real extreme-case.

Granted.

> > > What would an auto-generated session name, that would be completely
> > > unrelated to its contents, be useful for?
> > 
> > It allows to easily start kdevelop with a specific session, without
> > having to wait until its shutdown, restarted and the projects reloaded
> > completely.
> > 
> > And all this doesn't yet help at all if one wants to rename or delete a
> > session thats not the current one.
> You mean using the command-line? Well, I think that only a very small amount 
> of users will even get the idea to use the command-line to pick a session.

If you want kdevelop to replace kate for people (and thats something
that you said in munich, hence why we have such a fast startup and do
tons of things in the background) then those people are going to start
it from the cli a lot. Or, as Milian suggested, with a dedicated krunner
support or plasmoid.

> And even if they do, for most the open above, aka. "kdevelop -s
> ProjectName" would work.

Uhm, the last project I created is named "KDevelop4 Custom Buildsystem
Support" (and kdevelop4-custom-buildsystem on the filesystem), you don't
expect me to type that into the cli, right? And the same applies even to
kdevelop, thats 4 characters too much (and why I have a shell script
kdev4 that start kdevelop).

> Also we can simply say "If you want to pick your session from the
> command-line, you've got to name your session first", that really is
> no deal for advanced users.

That would be fine with me, if there was an easy way to do it. Right now
there is no such way.
 
> But just for this _tiny_ convenience for advanced users

The whole point of an IDE is convenience, if I wouldn't want convenience
I'd be using vim + make in a terminal.

> (remember: you can 
> simply start kdevelop, and pick your session through the menu), we shouldn't 
> clutter our UI with "Session 13 - Project1, Project2, Project3", or even worse 
> by forcing the user to name a session before he even has opened a project in 
> it.

Ok, don't enforce it. But we need to fix the ui to rename, create and
delete sessions, without having to first start the respective session.

> Btw. how should the user even know that "Session 13" is the one he wants? 
> Names only make sense if the user picked them manually, and forcing him to 
> pick a name makes only sense if we really require that name, but being able to 
> pick a session from the command-line is not a hard requirement.

IMHO it got a hard requirement at the time the -s switch was added.
Session support is a feature that only advanced users will use IMHO, as
"Joe Average" is just fine with his single session, single project thats
automatically re-opened all the time. And advanced users will start
kdevelop from the cli with the session name attached, as switching from
the "last used" session to a different one is simply too costly.

Andreas

-- 
You will feel hungry again in another hour.