Re: Need input from the community for anjuta (was Re: Proposed module: anjuta)

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Sun, 2008-01-06 at 23:47 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Le jeudi 20 décembre 2007, à 04:52 +0100, Vincent Untz a écrit :
> > Homepage: http://anjuta.sourceforge.net/
> > svn/git/bzr/...: http://svn.gnome.org/svn/anjuta/trunk/
> >                  http://svn.gnome.org/svn/gdl/trunk/
> >                  http://svn.gnome.org/svn/gnome-build/trunk/
> > Proposal on d-d-l: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2007-September/msg00252.html
> > 
> > Short description:
> > ==================
> > Anjuta is an integrated development environment for GNOME. It's purpose
> > is to make developing applications for Gtk+/GNOME easier. It integrates
> > other GNOME technologies such as devhelp, glade and gtksourceview.
> > 
> > Summary so far:
> > ===============
> >  + nothing :-)
> >  + FWIW, anjuta was proposed for 2.18, but there were no 2.x release at
> >    this point and the 1.2.x versions were unmaintained.
> >  + Comments from the thread on the old proposal:
> >    - anjuta 2.x is way better than the old 1.2.x one
> >    - there used to be no real release cycle for anjuta. It's my
> >      understanding that things are better in this area, but I didn't
> >      check.
> 
> Based on this thread, the release team could not decide what to do with
> anjuta: we need input from the community.
> 
> Here's what we got so far:
> 
>  + anjuta (devtools)
>   - no real comments from the community
>   - we want an IDE in the devtools suite
>   - good documentation
>   - really hard to translate, and many strings could be improved
>   - proposal to create an incubation suite and to put anjuta there until
>     there's a clear consensus on the fact that it's ready. Some people
>     don't like the idea.
>   => will get back to d-d-l to get more input from the community
> 
> One problem is that the release team members either have no use for an
> IDE (they don't code) or are old and {vim,emacs,whatever}-addicted, so
> it's hard for us to know.
> 
> If you use anjuta, speak up. If you have tried anjuta, speak up. If the
> name anjuta makes you feel something, speak up. If you want to be the
> next big movie star, speak up. Now.

I think two things are clear:

1) IDEs help attract new developers.
2) Most of us old developers don't use IDEs.

I always try my best to dogfood our desktop for most
tasks.  But for programming, my brain just doesn't
seem to work unless I'm in emacs.

If we want to have an IDE in our devtools release set
(and honestly, what's the point of a devtools release
set without an IDE?), then Anjuta seems like the most
natural choice.

Does Anjuta have (or do the developers plan to have)
glade-like or devhelp-like functionality built in, as
some other IDEs do?  This seems like a natural thing
for an *integrated* development environment to do.
If so, does it make sense for us to have stand-alone
applications for that functionality in the devtools
release set, if Anjuta is included?

If Anjuta is really hard to translate, and if the
strings could be improved, we could postpone until
2.24, with the provision that the Anjuta developers
need to work with the translation teams between now
and the 2.24 string freeze to fix this stuff.  This
is something that could have probably been addressed
earlier in the release cycle, if somebody had taken
the initiative.

--
Shaun