[anjuta-devel] BuilDj project backend

[Abderrahim Kitouni <a kitouni gmail com>]

Hi Sébastien, all,

I've tried to update the buildj project backend plugin I had, and found that there is more work needed than I first thought. More importantly, I think there are some things that need to be added/modified in anjuta to be able to have things work smoothly.

First, I'll try to describe briefly the structure of the buildj project file. There are 5 sections: project, options, requires, subdirs, targets. 

"project" contains things like the project name, version and url. These can probably be made properties of the root node.

"options" contains definitions for options that can be passed to the configure step (of waf in the current implementation). This isn't very useful now, and needs to be reworked before it can be useful in anjuta.

"requires" contains the packages (along with the version) needed by all the targets in the project.

"subdirs" allows a project file to be split in multiple files, we can ignore it for now, and it shouldn't be too hard to implement later on.

Finally, "targets" contains all the targets for the project.

So my main question is how to best represent these in the UI? It may be a good idea to group them the same way as in the project file, but then I think it may better to change it a bit: for example, subdirs could be groups and targets could be targets, and both would be direct children of the root node. But this won't work well for options and requires, which should probably be grouped somehow.

Now to my other remarks, regarding problems I've faced trying to implement these:

 * I'd like to have a different sorting order than what's currently shown in the ui (i.e. having requires before targets). Is this possible?

 * I noticed that the project manager doesn't update the UI when the node tree is updated, but rather monitors the project files and asks for them to be reloaded when they change (including when changed programatically).

 * Is it possible to have nodes that don't appear in the UI, but whose children do appear? I'm thinking of grouping the packages under one parent node, even if they appear as children of the root node in the ui (I'm not sure this is a good idea, but I'd like to try it)

 * It looks to me like the UI assumes packages need to be inside modules, which isn't the case for buildj.

Anyway this is more a braindump than coherent thoughts, but I hope you could get something out of it.

Regards,

Abderrahim