[Qt-creator] Why QtC does not use QDockWidget for most tool-panel

[André Pönitz]

On Fri, Apr 08, 2016 at 04:06:12PM +0300, Prav wrote:
> >> QtC is open source though, somebody could try it out and submit a
> >> contribution!
>
> There is a problem that you can make contribution but it would not be
> excepted ... and you will do useless work. You can fork QtC but this
> mean that you have to merge all new features of QtC by yourself.
> Seems better to discuss the plans of evolution of QtC and get
> agreement about future first.

You cannot avoid the risk of doing useless work. 

Even if a discussion results in consensus on that something should
to be implemented, an implementation may be rejected because it's
technically not up to snuff.

Even if your implementation is accepted there's no guarantee that the
next discussion doesn't result in a consensus that it was a bad idea
and your code is thrown out again.

Of course people will try to be reasonable, not act erratically, not
base decisions on the phase of the moon etc. But getting a guarantee?
No matter what? This will simply not happen.

So while it's worthwhile to discuss the rough direction of development
to avoid obvious dead ends, there's no point of overdoing it. In the end
it is code that counts, so if you really want to move things you need to
provide code as base of discussion.  Then people can try it out, judge
whether they like the feature *and* the implementation. 

The risk of getting a contribution that people like and that is
technically ok rejected in Qt Creator is rather low. So the main effort
after establishing a rough consensus on whether a certain feature is
acceptable is to provide an actual implementation, not to discuss each
and every detail before starting to code. You can easily override any
skepticism even of core developers on whether something is feasible
by providing an actual implementation. It is unlikely you achieve
the same with non-compilable text in an e-mail.

Andre'