Re: [DevHelp] Some requests

[Biswapesh Chattopadhyay <biswapesh_chatterjee tcscal co in>]

[I'm adding anjuta-devel and gnome-devtools on the CC list since this is
probably relevant to these lists as well - sorry for the x-post ]

On Mon, 2003-03-31 at 15:06, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> <snip>
> > > Work on Anjuta2 instead of a G2-port of Anjuta1 and you'll make me
> happy
> > > :)
> >
> > Why should throwing away good working, stable, profiled, mostly bug-free
> > working code and rewriting everything make anyone happy ?
> 
> Because a decision was taken to merge and now very limited resources are
> spread over two projects instead of one that could kick ass :)
> Another thing that would make me happy is if it was announced that there
> never was a merge and that we are talking about two completely different
> projects here. This would help people that want to hack on an IDE to
> choose where to put there efforts.

O.K - here goes:

1. There never was a merge. There was an announcement that the projects
will merge, but nothing came off it in terms of actual code merge. We
just continued on our seperate ways. This was probably because people
from both sides realized that it was easier said than done :-(
2. At the time of announcement, anjuta and gide had a mutually exclusive
set of developers - this continues to be the case till date, mostly due
to the huge difference in architecture and emphasis of the two projects.
Simply put, no one had the time to read and understand both the
codebases thoroughly and then port stuff over from anjuta1 to anjuta2.
Anyway, the vast differences in architecture meant that any such effort
would have ended up being a total rewrite anyway :-(
3. There is no one who is able to devote more than a few hours a week to
either of these projects. IMHO, with this kind of scarcity of resources,
it is virtually impossible to port all features of anjuta1 over to
anjuta2 without a total stagnation of new development for a prolonged
period of time - and we're talking years here. If it were not the case,
it would have been done.
4. The original developers of Gide spend virtually no time hacking on
the project. Also, this is purely personal opinion, but inspite of
having a seemingly messed-up architecture, more newbie developers find
it easier to contribute to anjuta1 than to anjuta2. So, as a result, the
feature gap between the two projects have become wider over time (this
is probably controvertial - and I do not mean in the slightest to ignore
the amount of work Gustavo and others have put in the anjuta2 codebase).

> We need a good IDE *BADLY* and by having this situation really doesn't
> help. If you can convince the anjuta2 hackers to drop that and join you
> guys in anjuta1 that would also be better than this situation.

The main reasons people think that all development should switch to
anjuta2 seems to be that:
	a) It's got a '2' after it's name
	b) It has a cleaner architecture
	c) The original announcement said so.
However, no one has been able to tell me why we cannot clean up anjuta's
codebase taking the better concepts from anjuta2 instead of rewriting
everything for anjuta2. It seems obvious to me that that would be much
less painful than the other option. Also, this is more feasible given
the sporadic nature of development time that people are able to devote
to anjuta/anjuta2.

I discussed these issues on IRC with anjuta2 developers and there was a
decision that I'd study the code of anjuta2 thoroughly and come up with
a document detailing the pros and cons of each direction. Sadly, I
haven't yet had time for that, but hopefully, I'll be able to do that in
the near future. Unfortunately, none of the anjuta1 developers are
full-time Linux/GNOME developers, so things move rather slowly :-(

Personally, I'd really like to see a merge - but, the other way round.
I'd like to cleanup anjuta's codebase to a more component-based
architecture by taking ideas and code from the anjuta2 codebase
*gradually*, without throwing away existing working code. For example,
we can take the build and wizards design, the GDL docking stuff, and
probably most of the plugin code from anjuta2 (these are the places
where the existing anjuta code sucks most) and move, one by one, the
anjuta components to use these features. This doesn't take that much of
dedicated effort and IMHO is the path of least resistance.

> 
> 
> Regards,
>   Mikael Hallendal
> 
> --
> Mikael Hallendal                micke codefactory se
> CodeFactory AB                  http://www.codefactory.se/
>                                 Cell: +46 (0)709 718 918
> 
-- 
Biswa.