plasmate and kdevelop coming closer?

[Giorgos Tsiapaliokas]

Hello,

my name is Giorgos and I am contributing to KDE since 2011.
Most of my contributions are on plasmate [1]. Most of my patches
are based on plasmate and these days I am the main contributor of plasmate.
Plasmate focuses on making it easier for people to create, test and publish 
plasma packages, like plasmoids and themes.


Also this year I have been accepted in GSOC and my project is
to port plasmate to KDevPlatform. Here [2] is a blog post explaining
the reasoning behind the port of plasmate to KDevPlatform.

Here is a small summary of my blog post. 
For me the goal of plasmate isn't to make plasmate the next big IDE, 
the goal is to give people the option of using the great tools that it 
provides. In the plasmate repository expect from plasmate we also provide most 
of its functionality as standalone applications. This desicion has been taken 
by the success that tools like plasmoidviewer and engine explorer had. Even in
the new tools that we added we kept offering them as standalone applications.


*But* until now plasmate wasn't using anything from KDevPlatform 
which led to a big maintainance burden. So we ended up at spending more
time  fixing stuff in plasmate rather than impoving the tools that it provides. 
Which for me isn't ideal. 

So which is the plan? As it regards plasmate, the plan is to make it focus on
plasma packages only and to be as simple as possible, for instance plasmate
shouldn't have a gdb debugger. As it regards the tools that 
plasmate(repository) offers the plan is to make them usable within from 
KDevelop because they will be plugins.

What I would like to see is us(the people working on KDevelop and plasmate) 
working closer. How could the plasmate contributors help KDevelop more? 
What would you like to see from plasmate? In general how can we collaborate
more? Do we all want to work together?


[1] https://projects.kde.org/projects/extragear/sdk/plasmate
[2] http://terietor.wordpress.com/2014/06/24/porting-plasmate-to-kdevplatform/

thanks,
Giorgos

-- 
Giorgos Tsiapaliokas

terietor.org