Re: [DevHelp] Some requests

[Mikael Hallendal <micke codefactory se>]

mån 2003-03-31 klockan 12.10 skrev Biswapesh Chattopadhyay:

> 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 :-(

Ok, do you think that this can be announced to the community? And be
made clear to everyone wanting to start helping on creating an IDE for
GNOME?

> 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 :-(

Yeah, that is what surprised me when the merge was announced. I figured
that the Anjuta1 developers wanted a clean start but it seems that
wasn't the case.

> 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.

Very true.

> > 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

Which needs to be fixed if there is never to be a merge. They shouldn't
be named the same, it's the same problem as 'gtkhtml' and 'gtkhtml2'.

> 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.

Yeah, without having looked at either code bases, if it's possible it's
almost always better to never rewrite. However in some cases the work of
cleaning up and replacing the parts needed will be a larger work than
rewriting from scratch. This was the way I got the feeling it was in
Anjuta1 (since it was announced that that code base was to be dropped).

If it's not I agree that it's probably better to work from that code
base and clean it up and move towards a better architecture part by
part. This is less fun for hackers though (since it's always more fun to
innovate).
 
Btw, is the Anjuta1 port for GNOME 2 buildable from CVS somewhere?

Regards,
  Mikael Hallendal
-- 
Mikael Hallendal                micke codefactory se
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