[Qt-creator] Some thoughts about 2.5

[Geronimo Ma. Hernandez]

On Donnerstag 31 Mai 2012, Coda Highland wrote:
> On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 11:05 PM, Geronimo Ma. Hernandez
> > 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.
> 
> By your definitions, Creator is "mid-level". It's extensible with
> plugins and it already has support for cmake and generic makefiles,

Well, this is only true for a developer that already knows very well 
QtCreator.
Its not at all true for a developer, that starts up with QtCreator - let me 
call it entry-user respect to QtCreator.

As entry-user you are not able to write plugins and for sure, you don't want 
to. What you want is a menu-entry called "import", where the ide handles all 
differences and possibly needed transformations of build-system.
As long as there is no menu entry for importing existing projects, I consider 
QtCreator being entry-level IDE.

> 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.

I think, before thinking about new plugins, its more important to think about 
an easy to use user interface for importing projects not built by QtCreator.

kind regards

Gero