[Qt-creator] Some thoughts about 2.5

[Geronimo Ma. Hernandez]

On Thursday 31 May 2012, Coda Highland wrote:
> And Creator already has an easy-to-use UI for the job -- it's just "open
> project".

Hm - do you refer to a former release of QtCreator?

The current menu-entry "open file or project" does not appear very helpful to 
me. There are so many filefilters in the drop down, that I can't imagine, what's 
a supported project and what's simply a file filter.

... but ok, I found "import project" at "new project" which comes very close 
to what I was looking for.

> 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

That would be great - and that's what I meant as professional level IDE.

> , possibly stashing some relevant metadata for convenience/extensibility
> (like the generic makefile project). 

not sure, whether I understand that.

> 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.

That would be extremely exciting, if that was true.
So I just imported a small project, created by netbeans c++, which compiles 
without errors from commandline.

I imported every file, which did not look bad.
But the build failed.
I did not take the time, to find out why.

... but let me focus again, what I think about ide and build abstraction:
Sure, bigger companies have their compiler and buildsystem you *must* use, so 
they don't need the help of an ide in managing their build system.

If you think about the reason, why a developer want's to change his ide, you 
probably end up in smaller companies, that decide to port their application. 
They have a working compiler and know their buildsystem, but none of them 
works on the desired new target platform.
So they look for a tool that is known to support portable applications. And as 
the currently used editor is some kind of oldfashioned, they start looking for 
an ide - and QtCreator is one in the list to get evaluated.

There are multiple (sub-)projects that build several targets of each kind.

So the requirements look like:
- use compiler RR for OS abc
- use compiler SS for OS def
- take that bunch of sources and build a target of type XX
- take subproject A-D to build target of type YY
- ...

So I would consider it a great help, if the ide is able to create projects 
that build fine. The ide could select the appropriate build system and generate 
the files necessary for build.


kind regards

Gero