Google Code In: First KDevelop Documentation Screencast!
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
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Comment by Robin Wernick (not verified) (2013-06-10 23:28:00)
Mr. Wolff, et al, your statement is exactly why the great group of the rest of us have a problem with the KDevelop4 design. I have been developing software for 30 years and have seen this blind arrogance of yours repeated unto death by high placed managers in numerous companies just before they bit the dust. God help the software department that you work for. Michael is very right and KDevelop 4.1 is a disaster of a rewrite since you can’t add files to a project through any menu item or key sequence configuration that I have seen. It is now the middle of 2013, KDevelop 4.5 claims to be released and the idiot down loader keeps repeating in a message-box “Connect to the Internet” and stalls without ever delivering KDevelop for Windows. The down loader is attached to an offensive zip unload-er that wants to take over all my browsers and I want to sign that company up for seal team six targeting. This is an appalling state of affairs for KDevelop, an IDE that I used about ten years ago and was hoping to standardize in my company again.
Now let’s get on to your blindly approved statemnts. It is an idiot’s task to “Open/Import Project” to get new files added to your original project because, once again, it can’t have any files in it since no one could ever have added any! When I tried it to see if there was a magic trapdoor to let me add some files, it insisted on creating yet another useless main file and a wasted my time trying to create this project so it could be added to the first leaving me in an even worse situation than before. Repeated infinitely it would use up all my life and get nowhere. Speaking of nowhere, you didn’t ever confirm that you were able to create a complex project from KDevelop 4. Your silence in the last three years is deafening and leaves you condemned as charged as being unhelpful and foolish.
This blind development of a product without ever checking with their user base has plagued companies for the last 70 years and displays a contremptous arrogance that has sunk product like the Edsel, the Apple 3, the Apple Lisa, Cisco’s emergency radio connection system, and Lotus’s 123. You are trying hard to join the wonderous ranks of the clueless loosers and we applaud you for your efforts. We promise you that your misguided statements will not be forgotten.
Now for business. As Kdevelop 4.1 is being obsoleted by the almost release of Kdevelop 4.5, the real Linux community is hoping these egregious system errors hav been corrected and the new interface is complete and intuitive as it should have been all along. Also, the annoying message “Documentation not available” no longer appears when KDevelop is installed. And the KDevelop web site is finally clued in that “adding files” can be found in the documentation there. And about CMAKE, a good change I agree, why does the system say that the default CMAKE.txt file needs to have a CMAKE minimum version statement added. The rule is, if you are so smart IDE then do it yourself and stop giving me idiot statements! I can work out compatibility with previous CMAKE files on my own. Try to get this maxim down, a good software tool must intuitively support a range of users with a widely varying knowledge base. Otherwise you are planning to build a joke of a program and you are not competent to comment on the work.
Comment by Michael (not verified) (2010-11-28 21:46:00)
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
Comment by Milian Wolff (2010-11-29 00:16:00)
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
Comment by Michael (not verified) (2010-11-29 16:43:00)
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
Comment by Prashanth N Udupa (not verified) (2010-11-27 23:58:00)
the video is really really good..