ANNOUNCE: New KDevelop Design

[Ralf Nolden]

Catalin Climov wrote:

Hi Catalin and others,

I got the message and now I have a more clear picture of what the story
is about. Well, as you stated, your offensiveness brought some response
;-)

Now let's get back to work:

As far as I see it now, the plan is about stripping the code completely
and make a new design that implements various things:

- language independence of projects
- KOM/OP based KDevelop core
- plugin structured adaptation depending on project type.

The question remaining is if the new branch is to be created on the KDE
CVS and who the members are you spoke of the other team.

Now that some things are cleared out (that was also my intention to get
clear facts about what's going on), we should start an official
discussion. 

We sure want to make use of the new CORBA technologies and so this will
require major changes in the future. One of the facts that prevented us
were that we thoght about porting to KDE 2 first to have a working IDE
for that as soon as possible and that worked out to some degree. 

Considering this, I think I have an offer that should be discussed where
to go and what to do - meaning that I'm open for any modifications or
plans.

This is:

a) Catalin's and our core team and any other user/developer interested
to help join forces and we make a plan together where things will go to
and form an extended core-team. That would make me and others a lot more
comfortable about the work. The work itself is again free, anyone who
wants to do something can do it, only restricted by a general roadmap to
the goal. We should also ask the guys from KDEStudio about if they would
help with the new branch because another KDE 1.x IDE doesn't make much
sense anymore, not because of availability of IDEs but because of the
fact that it is again based on KDE 1.x, followed by a possible porting
to KDE 2 and it will end like kdevelop now is.

b) We make another KDE 2 branch on the KDE-CVS which we may call
KDevelop-2000 or KDevelop-II or KDeveloper Studio or whatever you like

c) the new branch starts from scratch with KOM/OP as a base and takes
needed codeparts from the current branch, such as some classes, the
parser, treeviews etc.

d) the "old" KDE 2 porting of kdevelop is to be finished so we have a
working IDE for our work on the new branch - I am very interested in
this as I am really used to kdevelop for my work and I think others will
like that idea, too, as this will be finished much sooner. New features
should be frozen so we don't waste our time on that anymore; just finish
the porting.

My intention is to bring everyone together. This is required to my mind
because we all have different backgrounds and different time-frames. The
new branch will be MUCH work as it wants to undertake an attempt like
KodeKnight has been in some way and because of the complexity it didn't
make it to any usable state as an IDE. That is what prevents trying to
undertake such a nice but really time-consuming way. It is
time-consuming in various parts: not every developer has knowledge in
other programming languages than C++ or C, KOM/OP is all new to us and
we would have to spend some time to learn about it. Not to speak of the
plugins for other languages.

If that would make anyone happy, I would agree with the idea of a new
branch, so we can all take part on this. 

Now, about organizing work:

I think we should separate for several sub-teams which will take care.
Everyone can join as much teams as he wants and communication is always
open.
The needed parts seem to be:

- KOM/OP design
- general User interface: dialogs etc.
- a dialogeditor team : suggest Java/AWT support, gtk+ support, KDE/Qt
widget support with geometry management
- language team
- project interfaces team

Let's start discussing it. Do we want a complete restart or not ?  I
would be willing to work in a new team as well as to continue the
current workframe, whereby I think that the idea of a complete new start
would be worth the effort as well.

I hope that this suggestion is reasonable and finds the consent of
everyone. 

Bye,

Ralf

PS: Catalin, it was not about being egoistic, but everyone has some
reasons to start flaming ;-). So if I have been to rude, I apologize.
;-)