[Qt-creator] Some thoughts about 2.5

[Coda Highland]

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 11:05 PM, Geronimo Ma. Hernandez
<geronimo013 at gmx.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday 30 May 2012 - 19:50:53, Vojtech Kral wrote:
>> On 2012-05-30 19:02, Geronimo Ma. Hernandez wrote:
>> > On Mittwoch 30 Mai 2012, Vojtech Kral wrote:
>> >> On 2012-05-30 15:37, Geronimo Ma. Hernandez wrote:
>> >>
>> >> I think you misunderstood, the support is rather done in such a way
>> >> that the IDE drives an underlying scripted build system rather than
>> >> making all the compiler and linker calls by itself.
>> >
>> > So what? That's a reasonable implementation detail, that no user ever
>> > should care about.
>>
>> The user should definitely care about that, it's their build system
>> setup, importance of which in C++ I stated earlier.
>
> Well, quite sure, I did not get the point.
>
> If scripting is used to decouple QtCreator from external tools, so its common
> business and an implementation detail, that no user should care about. And no
> user should ever touch that scripts.
>
> If you are right, and the scripts are part of the build system, then my
> understanding of the latter statement was wrong. Than the application does not
> use scripts for decoupling and the user has to care about those scripts for
> sure.
> So where's the difference to drive external tools directly?
>
>> I think that if all that effort you put in writing to the
>> mailing list you put in actually reading up on qmake or cmake,
>> you would probably have mastered a good deal of it by now.
>
> Dear sir, you did not get rid of my intention.
>
> I'm not the focus of my writing!
> I write, to give food for thinking, to improve QtCreator. I believe, that a
> different point of view (like I'm not a C++ developer) might help on
> improvement or just let somebody start to think different.
> The reason for my heavy usage of the capitalized "i" is, that I can speak only
> for myself, for my way of thinking, for my believing. To point out, that I
> don't speak in common, I use phrases like "I think ..."
> ... but again: I'm not the focus of my writing!
>
> Respect to the build-functionality, I would categorize IDEs in 3 levels like
> this:
> 1.) entry level:
> an IDE can only manage projects created by itself, no import for existing
> projects created by other IDEs
>
> 2.) mid level:
> an IDE can manage projects created by itself and offers an import possibility,
> where projects created by other IDEs will be read and translated to the build
> system used by the IDE - or in other words: this IDE can read multiple build-
> systems, but write-support is limited.
>
> 3.) professional level:
> this kind of IDE can manage any kind of project - no matter, which IDE created
> the project, or whether it has been created manually. It has read and write
> support for a lot of build-systems and is able to continue using the build-
> system of the imported project.
>
> So according to this levels, I consider QtCreator a good (if not already the
> best) entry-level IDE and I wanted to send some triggers so that QtCreator
> could raise one level and become a mid-level IDE.
>
> kind regards
>
> Gero
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By your definitions, Creator is "mid-level". It's extensible with
plugins and it already has support for cmake and generic makefiles,
though with limited write support. It wouldn't be too hard to add
support for Code::Blocks, and possible to add xcodeproj or vsproj
(though building xcodeproj with external tools would require running
on Mac to begin with). All it really needs is someone to champion a
given project format, and it can be done.

/s/ Adam