[anjuta-devel] (no subject)

[seb sfo free fr]

Hi,


Here is a short summary about the current discussion in the GNOME Developer
Hackfest.

The goal is to be able to develop applications, similar to phone applications,
running in a limited and controlled environment. For the user is should mean
easier to install applications being sure that it will not impact his system.
For the developper, it should be easier to develop due to this limited scope.

The goal is to have an IDE for developping easily such application. Anjuta is a
quite obvious choice. But I think it is quite different from our current goals.

In my mind, one main goal of Anjuta is to develop any applications. We even
haven't our own project format allowing developers to use different IDE or no
IDE at all.

Here, the goal is to have one simple way to develop an application and improve
this use case.


As Anjuta is very flexible, I think it's possible to use Anjuta to implement
this GNOME application IDE even if I would like to keep the current goal because
I think it's what is making Anjuta different from other IDE. In my mind,
implementing this GNOME application IDE would be an interesting experience and
would benefit to Anjuta as a big part of code can be common.


To be more practical, I think one main change is to write at least a new project
backend plugin instead of using the autotools backend. I think it's needed to
present a simple interface to the developer. By example having a simple combo
list to select the targeted platform (GNOME 3.6, GNOME 3.8...) instead of a big
list of available libraries, hiding C compiler flags...

I think we could implement this GNOME application IDE by writing new plugins and
probably modifying a bit some existing one to be sure that it runs smoothly. By
example, one modification is to hide plugins not useful for GNOME application
IDE (like makefile backed, autotools backend...). It can easily by done by
adding an attribute in each plugin. Then, I don't know if we should have
- an option in Anjuta checked by default to show only GNOME application plugins,
this will effectively change Anjuta.
- call Anjuta with a different name but using the same executable.
- Create a new executable which can use the same plugins.
- A last option is to not use Anjuta at all.

What do you think?


Regards,

Sébastien