Problems with new session support

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 27.01.10 23:06:31, David Nolden wrote:
> Am Mittwoch 27 Januar 2010 23:06:58 schrieb Milian Wolff:
> > What would speak against making the session buttons open another instance
> > without closing the existing one? If the user wants to switch, he can
> >  simply close the other instance, no? I personally would find this far
> >  better adapted to my personal workflow. What do you think?
> 
> Because I think that the more common usecase is _switching_ and not opening an 
> additional session. You as a kdevelop developer might be a bit biased as you 
> probably often first open a kdevelop session and then an additional testing 
> session, but I think that's not the common usecase.

While I agree that we're a bit biased, from my "everyday" job I also
know that its not unrealistic to open multiple sessions. Right now I
have basically two source tree's that I'd have separate sessions for,
they're partly linked with each other, but one is java and the other is
C++ (mostly) so I wouldn't necessarily want to mix them. However in the
company in the mid-term at least one of the tree's will be split up into
more and I'll be having more sessions as I work on multiple of those
tree's (and in fact I think some of those sessions will share some open
projects then even).

And something that happens about 3 times a day or so is a colleague
asking me a question regarding something I'm not working on right now.
As the friendly helper that I seem to be ;) I often end up quickly
opening a file or two to verify what I'm going to answer. Right now this
happens with vim, but as I'm a rather poor vim-user (being able to only
work with a single file at once there) I'd love to use kdevelop for that
including the code-navigation features etc.

So the flow would be:

/me works with session X on feature Y
colleague comes in asking about something in subproject Z
/me opens session Z additionally (as I don't want to bother with saving
the in-editing code that I have in session X) to double-check something
colleague leaves happily with an answer that matches the actual code
/me continues writing in session X for a bit, then takes a break,
then continues coding
/me reads his support mail updates and notices a new mail which shows a
small bug, so I open session C to fix that bug

Just to give you a small user-story how I want to use sessions.

> It would be very inconvenient if you just want to switch to another
> session, and have to manually close the old session behind yourself
> through "ALT+TAB" etc..

Agreed. Nonetheless, if I want to do as I explained above, then
currently the most-convenient way for me is to start a new kdevelop
instance with -s and a very very short (or auto-completeable) name for
the session (I'd have sessions with just two or three characters in some
cases)

Andreas 

-- 
All the troubles you have will pass away very quickly.