[Qt-creator] Collaborative Editing

Mon Oct 28 13:55:56 CET 2013

Eclipse has collaborative text editor for Java and a few other languages. It runs over a jabber server (GTalk, AIM). I am not sure it currently works with their C++ development environment though. 

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9156449/is-there-an-eclipse-plugin-for-collaborative-editing

--
Mike Jackson

On Oct 28, 2013, at 6:19 AM, Campbell Barton <ideasman42 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 8:36 PM, Tobias Hunger <tobias.hunger at digia.com> wrote:
>> On 26.10.2013 09:49, Campbell Barton wrote:
>>> Hi, I was wondering if there was any effort to support collaborative
>>> editing in QtCreator,
>> 
>> I am not aware of any, no.
>> 
>>> Recently at the GSOC mentor summit I met with one of the mentors who's
>>> student added a generic library for KDE to support this, he says this
>>> will be added to the up-coming release of KDE. []
>> 
>> Does that work on windows and mac, too or is it linux specific. I think
>> it sits on top of telepathy, which -- considering the poor state of dbus
>> on windows/mac -- would make it a linux only solution.
> 
> I would guess not, we should ask though.
> 
>>> I was wondering if this would be interesting to others, and if it
>>> would be possible/desirable to add such a feature to QtCreator?
>> 
>> It should be possible. Whether it is desireable depends a lot on how
>> well it will actually work in the end:-)
>> 
>>> If this is acceptable would there be the possibility of accepting
>>> funding to get such a feature into QtCreator?
>> 
>> There are always consulting companies like Digia and others available
>> for such kind of work.
>> 
>>> In case it matters - I'm interested in this feature for virtual
>>> pair-programming.
>>> 
>>> [0] https://floobits.com
>>> [1] http://scummos.blogspot.de/2013/09/collaborative-text-editing-02-beta.html
>>> 
>> 
>> As floobits.com says: To make this worthwhile there needs to be more
>> than sharing an editor. Pair programming makes sense only if you both
>> parties can agree on the state of the application they are working on.
>> Otherwise there is no basis to start the programming from.
>> 
>> That opens more questions like:
>> 
>>  * How can we share the terminal output? floobits mentions terminal
>> sharing, too.
> 
> Agree - but I think (while nice to have) its not an essential feature
> for version 1.0 of such a tool.
> 
>>  * How can we share the debugger session?
> 
> Ok - this would be very good to have and your right to note this as a
> fairly important feature, again though I dont see the omission as
> something that would make collaborative editing useless.
> 
>>  * How can we share the running application? RDP/VNC maybe?
> 
> Again, good to have - not essential, I guess if you need all of this
> you may be better off with a VNC session or so.
> 
>>  * Should collaborative editing integrate into version control somehow?
>> Synchronization of state could be easier if you can just tell any editor
>> to checkout revision X and then apply a couple of changes on top.
>> Should one of the collaborators be responsible for saving/commiting the
>> file?
> 
> It could but IMHO its very minor issue to just make sure you have same
> revision checked out before beginning.
> 
>>  * An IDE is a bit more complex than a text editor: It has the code
>> model to worry about. That needs to know the complete project state, not
>> only one file. How is that going to be synchronized? Are you going to
>> ask the user to open project X before he can join a collaborative
>> editing session? How do you make sure both projects are in the same
>> state then?
> 
> Yes - it seems reasonable both people would have the same project open.
> Not sure what you mean by same state?
> 
>>  * How can this work across platforms and ideally even between parties
>> that use different versions of QtC (and ideally even other IDEs)?
> 
> I dont see this as such a problem - Of course if you work on a bug in
> X11 event handling and one of the devs is using OSX - this wont work
> well. I see this as a corner case...
> or at least an example of something that would be foolish to attempt
> --- or you use VNC or some remote desktop --- clearly its not going to
> work, OR - qtcreator would need some very advanced way of sharing
> application state but Id expect this is really a much larger project
> and out of scope for a plugin.
> 
> 
> While I see the points you make, I worry you are taking the attitude
> that EVERYTHING must work... otherwise its usless.
> 
> Since collaborative editing could eventually have a large scope - its
> fair to anticipate possible areas of integration, however I think its
> quite reasonable to expect both users to have the same project at the
> same code revision using the same version of QtCreator.
> 
> Simple switching files and collaborative editing text would be a great
> start and very useful as an initial target.
> 
>> Many people seem to be interested into collaborative editing nowadays,
>> so there is work we can build on in that area. Is somebody aware of work
>> on the other aspects of colaborative (C++) programming?
>> 
>> Best Regards,
>> Tobias
>> 
>> --
>> Tobias Hunger, Senior Software Engineer - Digia, Qt
>> Digia Germany GmbH, Rudower Chaussee 13, D-12489 Berlin
>> Geschäftsführer: Mika Pälsi, Juha Varelius, Anja Wasenius
>> Sitz der Gesellschaft: Berlin. USt-IdNr: DE 286 306 868
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> - Campbell
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