› Google Code In: First KDevelop Documentation Screencast! 
Sat, 11/27/2010 - 19:21
Woha, back when Lydia announced Google Code In and asked me whether I’d like to mentor some KDevelop projects, I wasn’t so sure this was a good thing. But then I saw that documentation could be requested from the students, and well… KDevelop 4 has no real documentation (except this) - why shouldn’t I try it?
So I put a few “screencast workflow XYZ” tasks into Google’s Melange Web Interface (which btw. sucks so much it’s incredible) and forgot about it. I didn’t really think there would be school students being interested in KDevelop, esp. not in writing documentation or doing a screencast. But thankfully I was proven wrong, and in all levels. Please behold, the first documentation screencast for KDevelop, showing you how to get started with a project, setting up a launch configuration, and doing some basic debugging:
I’m amazed by the quality of that video, very well done Geoffry and thanks already to Google for the Code In. Lets hope more students will provide me with such good work :) And I hope this helps some users to get started with KDevelop 4.
PS: KDevelop 4.1.1 will be anounced tomorrow, replace functionality was merged for the “Find in Files” plugin and development is actively continuing :)
PPS: We still want to improve the launch configuration dialog :D
Comments
This would have been great to Sun, 11/28/2010 - 21:46 — Michael (not verified)
This would have been great to have when I was trying to talk the executive directors of a major international investment bank in going with kdevelop4 since kdevelop 3.5.5 is basically useless under openSuSE 11.x without applying a number of unofficial manual patches found throughout the forums.
May I recommend that the next video would be about how one would go about creating a substantial system from scratch in kdevelop4. Since unlike prior version of kdevelop it seems that a developer needs to know things other than their programming language of choice; they seem to need to know about cmake which can be a bit much to ask for many people coming from MS visual studios development environment.
After using versions of kdevelop since 2002 is finding conversion to kdevelop4 painful; I can’t simply add files to project and have the system figure out I want to produce an executable, sharded or static library or some arbitrary combination with knowing about cmake
This video really brought somethings into focus. Hopefully there will more serious and substantial videos to come.
Btw the company prefers much to my chagrin Eclipse
Hey Micheal, interesting Mon, 11/29/2010 - 00:16 — Milian Wolff
Hey Micheal,
interesting feedback. For someone like me who never used KDevelop 3 back then, it is probably much easier to get acquainted with KDevelop 4. Many of your “problems” never hit me in this way, for example:
“simply add files to project” - You would start with “Open/Import Project” and just use the folder of your project and be done with it, what would you need to “add”? And if you mean copy over files from a second project, then just do that, you can use any file manager (or plain cp on the cli) for this job. KDevelop 4 has no “project files”, it just displays everything in the project folder and below.
“the automagic build system” - This one is a tough spot. For one thing, autotools was apparently so complicated that you could not use it except with a proper generator. But what I heard was that even the quite good support in KDev3 was buggy and error prone. Now in KDevelop 4 we use a different mantra, we force the user to know his build system. For QMake and CMake that is easy (really!), but of course requires some work from the developer. We will try to continue to add helpers and wizards (as can be seen in e.g. “create class”), but in the end you’ll have to know the underlying tool. Of course this is a royal pita for people stuck on autotools, noone has yet stepped up to finalize the autotools support for KDevelop 4…
Anyhow, lets see where we can put KDevelop over the next months, I do think some helpers for CMake e.g. would be a blessing. Snippets would help there already I think.
Bye
And therein lies a great Mon, 11/29/2010 - 16:43 — Michael (not verified)
And therein lies a great weakness in Kdevelop4 when compared to it predecessor kdevelop3 which causes one to resist conversion and in my opinion downgrade to kdevelop4.
Look with no one wants I know wants to know about a build system CMake or otherwise. An IDE is suppose to isolate you from knowing such thing. As a long time hands on developer of 25 plus years on multiple platforms the only things I want to know when working in those environment are the programming language C++ and the environment APIs’ of those environments; QT, Kdevelop LINUX or MS Windows
Today is my last attempt to use Kdevelop4 and because kdevelop3 is broken under all versions of openSuSE 11.x I maybe totally abandoning Kdevelop environment. Come on!!! I have about 300 C++ files in a directory and all I want to compile them into a libraries and executable without resorting to some type of manual convolution with the build system such as Cmake
Like I said earlier I was VP at a major investment bank and because of crap like what I am currently going through right now is why kdevelop does not now have does not have a feather in its hat as being the IDE of choice for LINUX development.
A major rewrite does not mean better for a users perspective; all a user cares about is how easy and productive the product makes them. If you do do a major rewrite as you guys have done there better be an effort to make clear how the major rewrite works so big fans such as myself can be out there doing a convincing job of converting MS visual studio and Eclipse developers to Kdevelop as you they attempt to move to LINUX environment.
Hope to see more convincing videos
the video is really really Sat, 11/27/2010 - 23:58 — Prashanth N Udupa (not verified)
the video is really really good..
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