RFC: Moving forward with KDevelop plugins

[Kevin Funk]

Heya,

this is a topic I've been pondering about for quite a long time already...

Currently, we have quite a few interesting plugins in different repositories, 
unfortunately they're not available to the wider audience because people still 
have to compile them in order to try them out.

I'm thinking of kdevelop.git to hold all the tools you need for general C++/Qt 
development. We're mainly a C++/Qt IDE after all, and we should focus on 
providing an excellent experience "out of the box" on that matter.

Currently, we have kdev-qmake and kdev-qmljs, both highly useful plugins for 
our audience, but in separate repositories. I'm proposing to merge them into 
kdevelop.git. For obvious reasons: It makes them available "out of the box", 
users don't need to install extra packages; and *we* don't need to wait until 
packagers decide it's a good time to package those *at all*. There's still no 
official kdev-qmljs package available for Debian/Ubuntu for instance, it just 
takes a lot of time and nagging to get there [1].

My proposal:
- Move kdev-qmake, kdev-qmljs into kdevelop.git
  (Very much desired from my side)
- Move kdev-valgrind, kdev-cppcheck, kdev-krazy, ..., into kdevelop.git
  (Nice, too, they're all C++ related after all. Could be disabled by default)
- "Bigger" language extensions, such as kdev-python, kdev-ruby, ...,
  stay in their resp. repository (-> separate package)

Issues:
- kdev-qmake depends on kdevelop-pg-qt. But personally I wouldn't have a 
problem creating a dep on kdevelop-pg-qt for KDevelop. kdevelop-pg-qt is 
mostly static and can be considered almost a "framework", it's not a fast-
moving target as kdevplatform
- Some of the plugins, like the small checker plugins are in early stages. But 
honestly, if we don't get the out we'll never get them tested^Wused by our 
users. (-> "release early, release often")

What do you think? I'd be happy to do the work if we come to an agreement. We 
can do a subtree-merge of all the plugins and keep the Git history, this is 
not an issue.

I'd really like to drive KDevelop forward; we have lots of feature but don't 
let the user enjoy them. Let's make it easier!

Cheers,
Kevin


[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=777591

-- 
Kevin Funk | kfunk at kde.org | http://kfunk.org
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