[Anjuta-list] anjuta and real life projects

[Timothee Besset <timo qeradiant com>]

Ok .. I briefly tried Anjuta based on the great feedback I got about it
from fellow developers. The features seem great, and it's Gtk based ..
something on which I have a much better feeling than Slickedit and motif
(Slickedit being my current IDE for unix developement)

My problem is that I want to use Anjuta on real life projects.
Specifically my projects don't use automake and autoconf .. their source
is not meant for immediate release anyway. And I couldn't get Anjuta to
start a blank project, and add my own source file info, build info etc.

Right now I see the IDE problem on Linux as follows:

- there seems to be a quantity of good IDE out there .. they provide a
bunch of interesting features, such as integrated debugging, source
browsing, syntax highlighting, auto-completion .. (I think if I get all
that, it's enough for me for the moment ..)

- in most cases, they are adapted to only ONE type of project. KDevelop
would do KDE-Qt stuff, will create it's own project description files ..
Anjuta seems to do the same with Gtk and automake / autoconf .. and
there are others in the same case.

So ... what about settling down around a meta-description of a project?
That is the general information you need:
- the various configurations for this project
- the source files involved, all needed info as to what the search
directory and dependencies are
- the corresponding binary targets and their settings for debugging

I think that right now, Anjuta has this knowledge, and could build the
meta description for any autoconf-based sources .. which covers most of
the cases. Now if I use my own Makefiles, I could write and maintain the
meta description myself. If I use another build system (such as cons
http://www.dsmit.com/cons/ ) I could arrange for cons to generate the
meta description on the fly for anjuta and only have to care about my
cons scripts ..

I'm not saying that I have any time to implement that, but I think
that's the way IDEs should go in the future. Developer Studio also had
this problem when they needed to support Intel's C++ compiler.

Opinions?