[anjuta-devel] Anjuta Help and project manager

[Sébastien Granjoux <seb sfo free fr>]

Hi,


I have spent the last week to work on the manual using the new Mallard 
format. I have tried to fill the project management part.

I think it's better to not commit these changes in the master branch now 
to avoid disturbing translators. Then, perhaps we can create a new 
branch gnome-3-0 or gnome-3-2 and commit here else I will just wait a 
few days.

It's really a first draft, it needs more work.


I have tried to organize the page by plugin. Mallard is quite useful for 
this. I think it would be probably useful to have a page listing all 
plugins as the user could have to enable some of them.


I have described for the project manager several points which are really 
specific to the autotools plugin. The issue is that it's the only 
backend allowing to write the project files.

I don't know if we could simplify the project manager to avoid this 
dependency. I have two ideas.

Try to remove the module node. I think it would be better to be able to 
add directly libraries to targets but I don't know how to do this.

Merge groups and targets. There is few difference between a group and a 
target. Some target like data target in autotools format are really just 
grouping files, so perhaps we could consider them as group. But then 
what is the difference between a target and a group? A target could 
always correspond to a file while a group doesn't?


I have found an issue with the project manager too. If you set C flags 
on a target, autotools creates a specific target named 
"target_name-source_name.o" and the compile command is not working 
anymore as it tries to make "source_name.o". I think only the project 
manager can take care of this and define the right object target. But it 
will change the project tree (we can keep the tree view though) as 
currently the parent of a source file is the final program, not an 
object file.


Another issue is that all explanations about module and package are 
quite specific to C program. I don't know if it applies to Vala or Java 
libraries. I imagine that it's a bit different and I don't know how to 
present that. Putting all informations on one page will make it quite 
long. But having an additional index page and then the right information 
seems a bit annoying. A nice solution could be to have a context, 
allowing to display Anjuta documentation in C context or Java context.


I have described several topics more related to autotools than Anjuta 
and I think I need to add more details but it will make the 
documentation even bigger. Do you think we should continue in this 
direction or concentrate on Anjuta only giving http links to autotools 
manual?


Do you think, it's useful to add more advanced information in this 
manual. By example the description of the project wizard template format?


I think rewriting the documentation would be really useful but needs a 
lots of time. Perhaps we can fix it as a goal for the next release.


Regards,

Sébastien