Re: [anjuta-list] Development for Anjuta 3.8

[Johannes Schmid <jhs jsschmid de>]

Hi Sébastien!

> I haven't been very active recently because I still plan to work on 
> Anjuta. What do you expect for the next release 3.8 of Anjuta?

I honestly don't know how much time I will have for anjuta development
but I will at least try to support anybody else working on it as much as
possible!


> * Check usage of Anjuta in gnome-shell
> Gnome shell is quite different from the old GNOME desktop so I think we 
> should at least check that Anjuta works find in this environment. I 
> imagine that we will have to improve some things, by example to open a 
> new window. I don't know if it's working using D-Bus message, just 
> command line options or something else.
> 
> 
> * Improve Anjuta command line
> Currently, we can open a file or a project from the command line. I 
> think it would be useful to be able to open a project wizard file and 
> perhaps allow to build a project. Such function could be perhaps 
> available from D-Bus interface too.

What needs to be done here is to clean up the usage of GtkApplication in
main.c, anjuta.c and anjuta-window.c. It's probably not that difficult
but the documentation doesn't really consider application like anjuta
very much.

> * Allow to load more autotools project
> Currently, the parser doesn't support:
> - conditional in Makefile.am or configure.ac 
> (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=646532)
> - configuration files added in macros 
> (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=642785)
> - concatenate operator (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=650743).
> Fixing these will allow to load more projects.

Sounds good to me but the parser is all in your hands anyway ;)

> * Add more project backend
> It can be useful to add a backend for CMake by example.

I doubt that this will happen unless somebody steps up and implements
it. CMake doesn't seem to be very popular in the GNOME world as of now.

> * Support more options in autotools project
> At the moment quite a lot of options can be changed in the project 
> wizard only, like C++ support, internationalization, library support. I 
> think it would be better to allow to set this in the project manager. I 
> don't know which options are the most useful.

That would indeed be a big improvement.

> * Add missing source files on commit
> I think the version control plugin (mainly git) should propose to add 
> all sources files when you commit some changes. Including project files 
> like new Makefile.am, when they are not already added.

Actually the git integration is one of the things I will try to work on
if I find time.

> * Generate distribution package
> This has been already proposed, I don't know how difficult is it. Will 
> it be possible to generate both .rpm and .deb? Could it be done without 
> being distribution specific?

This is a hard problem and I have no good solution to it but there is
indeed demand for it.

> * Make Anjuta starts faster
> Anjuta is a bit slow to start.

I don't think this is a big issues nowadays.

> * Allow to build in different environment
> Carl-Anton has proposed a patch for building a program using jhbuild. I 
> think it's quite interesting. We had some plugins for scratchbox in the 
> past but I think it's not working anymore. Perhaps we can put some 
> effort here to see what can be done.

It would be cool if we could integrate the jhbuild patch because this is
what quite some people are using.

> * Allow to debug python or vala
> Currently the debugger is working correctly for C. I have implemented a 
> python debugger plugin a long time ago. I don't know what can be done 
> for Vala. It's probably interesting to improve this part.

Debugging vala requires some changes to gdb and can be tricky but a lot
of people will love a vala debugger of course because debugging the C
code generated by vala isn't that much fun.

Regards,
Johannes