[anjuta-devel] RFC: Killing Anjuta-Extras

[James Liggett <jrliggett cox net>]

Hi Everyone,
While making recent anjuta-extras releases, I noticed that it has not
been ported to Anjuta 3.0. I'd like to take this opportunity to warn
anyone that uses it that I will not be making a 3.0 release for it,
because it is too late in the cycle to to expend the effort needed to
port anjuta-extras to 3.0.

Yesterday on IRC Johannes, Massimo, and I discussed this situation.
During our discussion, I floated the idea of killing off anjuta-extras,
possibly by the 3.2 or 3.4 cycles. I suggested this for a number of
reasons:

1. Having some plugins in a separate module is a serious maintenance
headache. When API's in libanjuta change, the plugins in anjuta-extras
are not updated at the same time as the ones in the main tree. When this
happens, a lot of things in anjuta-extras remain in an unusable state
for a very long time. As a corollary, there have been very few useful
code changes to anjuta-extras in the past few months to a year. I think
that Seb is pretty much the only one has really touched anjuta-extras in
any consequential way recently. (Though I do see that Massimo and Dragos
have also gotten in the odd change too.) 

2. Most of the plugins in anjuta-extras are outdated and should be
rewritten anyway. One example would be the profiler, which needs to be
brought up to par with Anjuta changes in the last year or so (mainly
foocanvas.) Massimo also discussed the possibility of rewriting the
Valgrind plugin.

3. The Scintilla editor, even upstream, is not quite ready for gtk 3.0.
While their release history does mention plans for porting some form of
it to gtk 3.0 [1], there is no timeline for this to happen. Also, as
GtkSourceView gains more features, the need for Scintilla continues to
dissipate. About the only feature that I can recall that sourceview
doesn't have is code folding [2], which may show up in the 3.2 cycle,
pending the approval of an appropriate patch. 

Feel free to share your thoughts on the issue. 

Thanks,
James

[1]: http://www.scintilla.org/ScintillaHistory.html 
[2]: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=134610