[Qt-creator] Some thoughts about 2.5

[Coda Highland]

>> 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

I wasn't suggesting that an end-user write plugins. I'm saying that
Creator is already in that position, because it supports plugins and
new plugins CAN be added if there's demand for them. And Creator
already has an easy-to-use UI for the job -- it's just "open project".
There's no "import" step necessary because Creator doesn't try to be
excessively smart and CONVERT the project into its native format, but
instead it just USES that project file directly, possibly stashing
some relevant metadata for convenience/extensibility (like the generic
makefile project). This is much less error-prone because Creator then
just asks the original build system to handle the build, so you're
guaranteed equivalent compilation.

/s/ Adam