de-mythifing KDevelop and KOffice

[Pupeno]

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I think this IS the spirit... if this was going to become a interview/dot 
story, instead of one big interview I'd make small interviews to people like 
you showing that there are lots of people that put the hands on the code.
Thanks.

On Wednesday 21 April 2004 15:02, Alexander Dymo wrote:
> As KDevelop developer I'd like to "de-mythify" it a little bit ;)
>
> > I see that in various places KDevelop and KOffice are named as the two
> > biggest projects that achieved a lot by a very small team of developers,
> > that also carries the request for help of other developers to make this
> > aclaimed applications (or set of applications) better.
> > I consider myself a developer and to be honest I'd be afraid of putting
> > my hands in either KDevelop nor KOffice. Why ? Because from the outside
> > both seems to be extremely complex things, that can be broken easily.
> > KDevelop... a program for programmers... you need to make high quality
> > code, there are tons of plug ins (and that means a complex plug in
> > structure) and the complex and huge amount of templates.
>
> Generally, to work on KDevelop you shouldn't be the expert in programming.
> If you work with KDevelop (even if you have just started with a tutorial)
> then KDevelop becames your tool which you can adjust to your needs. So "a
> program for programmers" becames "a program for you". I bet once you have
> learned KDevelop in a user level and started to work in it, you see various
> things (not necessarily very complex) to improve.
> I mostly refer to myself here, but my way to KDevelop developer was exactly
> as I described above. I wanted to have a good IDE where I can write
> programs, I started with KDevelop and I started to fix little things that
> annoyed me. For example, the first thing I done was the little improvement
> in c++ new class wizard which allows specifying the base class.
> So, I'm sure there are tons of little things that can be done by a new
> programmer.
>
> Now about complexity of KDevelop internals. The program has pretty good
> and easy plugin-based design. Everything in KDevelop is a plugin - a class
> derived from KDevPlugin interface. Interfaces are well understood and
> documented.
> You think that the fact we have tons of plugins denotes complexity and you
> are wrong here! If we had a complex plugin structure (complex interfaces)
> we wouldn't have so many plugins.
> The plugin structure does denote that KDevelop is easy to extend. Let my
> main argument here be a code itself. Just create "KDevelop Part" using
> KDevelop application wizard and you will get working plugin written using
> just several lines of code. That code will include a class derived from
> KDevPlugin which have only constructor and destructor and a class derived
> from QWidget to embed into KDevelop toolviews. Nothing that complex!
>
> You say it's easy to break things. If you work on a new plugin or improve
> existing, you just can't break things. Plugins are independent, the fact
> that one particular plugin doesn't work correctly does not imply that
> others will break too (as long as your plugin doesn't crash, of course;) ).
> That's one of the main points of pluggable architecture.
> I won't say there are no ways to break things. Plugins use core interfaces
> to communicate to each other, and if you modify interfaces there is always
> a risk of breaking something. But if you are a newbie, you don't want to
> touch interfaces, do you? ;)
>
> Of course, there are plugins that do complex tasks like language support
> parts or project managers. They are indeed complex but I want to say that
> there is always a possibility to make things in a simple way and KDevelop
> always allows to do so. Take a look, for example, at cpp support with code
> completion, language parser and other glorious stuff and take a look at
> ruby support that is so simple. Today I'm very curious why we don't have c#
> support in KDevelop. One could wrote basic c# support
> in a single day (or even in a couple of hours using "KDevelop language
> support" application template).
>
> Some of KDevelop plugins have even their own plugin structure that can
> simplify your task even more. For example, if you want to write compiler
> options dialog for your beloved compiler, you need to know only about
> KDevCompilerOptions interface and nothing more. I designed new
> documentation part in KDevelop in the same plugin-based way.
>
> Ok, I'm not going to say that everything is that easy. Improving language
> parsing, code completion stuff or autotools requires more knoledge.
> But if you want to improve those, maybe it's time to take a good book
> and learn new interesting things;)
>
> > Now, is all this complexity I'm mentioning true ? or there are parts of
> > KDevelop and KOffice that are simple and that a newbie developer could
> > help
>
> Yes, there are simple parts (majority of KDevelop parts are not complex)
> and there also are simple tasks can be done in complex parts.
>
> > Maybe some interviews could help.
>
> Hmm, last time interview with KDevelop developers was held in 2002.
> It would be good to conduct it in 2004.

- -- 
Pupeno: pupeno at pupeno.com
http://www.pupeno.com
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