Support for custom projects

[Alexander Kuit]

This is a note on using kdevelop with custom (means: already existing, also
non-KDE or -Qt) projects.

Though working with kdevelop is fun, using it with already existing projects
is a serious problem, because

1. Kdevelop insists on creating its own directory structure. It simply
refuses to create a custom project inside an existing directory.
Unfortunately, existing projects tend to have an already existing directory
structure.

2. The only way to use kdevelop with already existing files is to copy them
to the newly created directories. Not only is this a tedious procedure,
especially if files reside in several directories, but who really wants to
create a copy of a project and change existing structures, just to be able to
use kdevelop? (Don't mention the trick of creating a symbolic link to the
existing project root)

For these reasons, I couldn't use kdevelop at work. That's why I started to
have a closer look at the .kdevprj files and ended up with a small script I
added as an attachment to this mail. Simply switch to an existing project
root and run it without parameters. It will create a file called auto.kdevprj
without touching any of the existing files. Open auto.kdevprj with kdevelop
and you will have (almost) all the benefits of kdevelop, including debugging.

It works on my Linux system. I also tested it on Solaris, but it didn't work,
because there seems to be a bug in "find" regarding the -o option (it can
easily be changed to make it run, though). It can easily be extended or
modified to personal preference. I hope it's a source of inspiration for the
kdevelop-team (I would rather have a nice gui instead of this script ;-)

Now I'm able to introduce kdevelop to my colleagues and make it our standard
IDE! Any comments welcome.

Alexander Kuit
mailto:alexander.kuit at omp.de

(See attached file: kdev.sh)
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