[Qt-creator] GSoC 2018: New feature proposal for Qt Creator

[Orgad Shaneh]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 10:32 PM, Sree Gowtham Josyula <
sreegowthamj at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Tobias,
>
> Thanks for the feedback. I have also been a little skeptical about
> implementing the proposal in entirety in the GSoC time frame of 100
> days. However, I have put my thoughts elaborately in the proposal to
> convey what I had in my mind and the direction I would like to proceed
> in.
>
> As you have suggested, I have cut down my initial proposal to the
> following features -
>
> 1. Writing a filesystem wrapper for access of files to remote system
> 2. Support editing of remote files and syncing them via rsync
>
> Future Work (Not in Scope for GSoC 2018)
> 1. Version control support
> 2. Support for goto-definition, code refactoring and on-fly syntax checking
> 3. Setting up of Toolchain of Remote Machine on Development Machine
> 4. Build and Debugging of code
>
> Any thoughts, comments and suggestions on above proposal?
>

Hi,

I think you should avoid continuous work on a remote network drive. This is
highly inefficient from our experience, at least over SMB (a linux server
running samba, and Windows clients that access it).

The way I see it, there are 2 efficient ways to work locally and build
remotely:
1. rsync *on build* (not on every save!). From our experience, it works
very fast - even the first sync which is full takes less than 1 minute for
18K files. Incremental rsync takes a few seconds.
2. Using Git. You can have a simple shell script that synchronizes the
remote (assuming you don't need manual authentication for each operation on
the remote):
This is just a quick sketch. You need some form of initial setup, naming
convention for directories (we duplicate the local tree structure. That is,
if the project is in D:/Projects/SomeProject then on the remote it will
synced to /home/user/Projects/SomeProject), error handling etc...

commit=$(git stash create)
if [ -z "$commit" ]; then commit=$(git rev-parse HEAD); fi
git push -f build-server:project/directory $commit:refs/build
ssh build-server 'cd project/directory && git reset --hard refs/build &&
<build command[s]>'

I sort of assume that the remote is linux. The local machine can be either
Windows or Linux, set up with keys for SSH authentication.

We do *all the work* locally - this means that all the Git operations are
local and fast, and code parsing and browsing is also fast.

For compilers, we have dummy (or custom) compilers. They are only used for
correct parsing.

You need the target sysroot. At least /usr/include and libraries that you
link in your application.

You can use a multiarch debugger locally. We built gdb on MinGW with
--enable-targets=all. This covers all the possible targets.

This approach narrows down your project to the following tasks (there might
be more):

   1. Setup a working (typically SSH) connection with the remote.
   2. Allow the user to locate the compiler on the remote machine.
   3. Synchronize the sysroot on demand (let the user choose what to
   include/exclude).
   4. Detect compiler properties (type [GCC, Clang, ICC...], ABI, defines,
   include paths) from remote machine and pass them to the code model. Adapt
   include paths to the local sysroot.
   5. Configure Source Path Mapping for the debugger (you need to discover
   the user's home directory and according to the naming convention described
   above, set proper mapping. e.g. D:/Projects -> /home/user/Projects)
   6. Replace Build Steps with Remote Build Steps.
   7. Remote Build Steps will have automatic steps (like qmake step and
   make step for qmake projects) for pre-build rsync to the server (of code)
   and post-build rsync from the server (of artifacts), with options to choose
   which directories to include/exclude.
   8. Debugging support.

Let me know if you need more information or just disagree :)

Good luck!

- Orgad
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