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

[Naba Kumar <naba kumar gmail com>]

Hi,

On Sun, 2008-01-06 at 23:47 +0100, Vincent Untz wrote:
> > 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.
> 
I am an Anjuta developer, so I may sound biased, however here are few
things that might help people give their opinions (especially for the
IDE illiterates).

We put a great deal of efforts in making non-functional side of Anjuta
too and the whole point of that is to make it polished and be suitable
for GNOME desktop. Why I mention it? For a team of non-commercial and
free-time developers, they are the hardest part to get right. :) So I
will start with them.

- User documentation: It has a comprehensive documentation covering most
important functions, like project management, editing etc. Not all
plugin features are document, but that's because there are so many of
them and are optional to the user. We welcome more help in
documentation.

http://anjuta.org/documentations/subpage/documents/C/anjuta-manual/anjuta-manual.html

- API documentation: Most plugin APIs are documented and there are
tutorials on writing plugins and wizards.

http://anjuta.org/documentations/subpage/documents/libanjuta/index.html

- Significant efforts have been made to improve icons and graphics to
give professional look (we need to update screenshots with the new
icons).

http://anjuta.org/screen-shots

- Usability: We follow closely many accessibility and usability ideas in
our UI designs; dialogs, shortcuts, menus etc. are all decided based on
GNOME guidelines and how apps in GNOME work in general. Granted, no
full-scale usability analysis has been done for Anjuta and there are
still areas to improve, but we try to keep them in check. I would
personally say Anjuta has a very good UI.

If you visit all equivalent IDEs in the world, Anjuta has the least
amount of menus and actions. A GNOME tradition and we pride on it :).

- Internationalization: Significant effort is made to make UI properly
translatable (xml, meta-data, UI, wizard pages, etc.). I mean the
technical implementations are done keeping proper i18n in mind.
Understandably, there are lots of bad strings and so on, we are fixing
the bugs as we go. We appreciate the help from i18n/l10n teams.

- Localization: I have seen very active localization updates happening
in Anjuta. Not all languages are in 100% marks, but things move
appreciably - thanks to gnome svn and l10n teams.

- Releases: We have on average 1.5 month release cycle (9 releases last
year). That indicates our activity level. It's reasonably well spaced
cycle without giving too much overhead in release preparations (a great
deal of effort, surprisingly). Sometimes, we also provide binary
packages for convenience for platforms we are running on (i.e. mostly
ubuntu) just for quick grabs.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=14222&package_id=11898

- Bugzilla: Our bugzilla module is very active.

- Anjuta website is well maintained.

Now some technical aspects:

- Integrated glade UI designer: We require tight coordination with
glade-3 development. It is going very well, going together in GNOME
releases (which eventually are adopted by distros) would make it even
better.

- Integration with devhelp: Same story. I would like to see all the 3
projects to go together.

- gdl/gnome-build are technology pushing libraries that other
applications can take advantage of. I remember some discussion on
eclipse using/porting gnome-build library to have proper automake
support like anjuta does. Don't know how it stands now, other IDEs can
certainly use it. gdl is a nice docking library that many complex
applications can use.

- Anjuta plugin API is fairly comprehensive and would allow 3rd party
plugin developments to bring more IDEness to GNOME development tools.

- If more points come to mind, I will post follow ups :)

Thanks.

Regards,
-Naba