KDevelop and Kate advancements over the last weeks
Hey all,
I didn’t blog in a long while so I thought I’d dump some notable things I did over the last weeks. It’s probably neither complete nor thorough - you should try it all out to see it for yourself :)
Kate
Lets start small with my Kate contributions. I really concentrate on KDevelop nowadays since Kate works quite well for me and I don’t have many itches to scratch anymore :) So, what did I do these last weeks? Mostly cleanup and performance work, especially regarding MovingRanges which of course is mostly needed for a good experience in the upcoming KDevelop 4.2. With the help of Dominik Haumann I also went through our indentation unit tests and made sure we expect all currently failing test cases, as well as fixing those I could. Now we (finally!) have a passing test suite and get noticed about introduced regressions. Awesome!
KDevelop
Of course I still concentrate my contributions on KDevelop and related plugins. What I find quite interesting is that I’m now for over two months in a “polish-and-bugfixing” -mode, without adding much new features. I think that shows that I’m quite satisfied with the existing features, just not with the way they are integrated. E.g. the Kate performance improvements above were done in order to make “reformat source” not hang the IDE for a couple of seconds anymore, in KDevelop 4.2 it will only be like one second for really big source files. I’ve also tackled our black sheep, the “launch configuration” dialog. I didn’t rewrite it, but I did some polishing and have some more ideas to hopefully get it into a useable state. Oh, I just remember: I also spent some time on the “Snippets” plugin, restructured the editor dialogs a bit and made them use Katepart as well, for syntax highlighting and proper editor features :)
I generally care about small things nowadays, like e.g. that all widgets have a proper tooltip. This is also something where you all could help: If you find a widget in KDevelop master (4.2) that has no tooltip, please notify me! I’ve added those e.g. to the outline and quickopen toolbar widgets among others.
And since KDevelop 4.1 was in beta stage I’ve fixed lots of bugs and continue to do that. I triage each new bug for KDevelop/KDevplatform, request feedback and valgrind logs and try to fix whatever I can. Even now I can safely assume that KDevelop 4.2 will be more stable than 4.1, even though we did lots of architectural changes in the platform, esp. regarding MovingRanges.
And now to the last and to me most pleasing part: New features! Remember how I said I didn’t do lots of feature development at all these past days? This is basically true, instead I let others do the work :) We really get more and more patches and merge requests by other people, and I did merge quite some changes already. We have an improved “find in files” plugin now, and the French students are working hard on giving it replace functionality as well! We already merged their improved QtHelp plugin that gives you the ability to integrate arbitrary .qch files into KDevelop, e.g. the KDE Api documentation. They also work on [man integration](, which will be a joy for all STD C / C++ developers.
Furthermore we now have a “Filter…” line edit above the project manager view, “Argument Dependent Lookup” for the C++ plugin, a much improved “Problems” toolview, with the ability to show TODOs etc. pp.
This is just from the last few weeks, and it’s work done by many new contributors. It’s really very cool to see this happening.
Oh, and I personally worked a bit on the QMake support for KDevelop, I’m not sure whether I will manage to get this into a usable state for KDevelop 4.2, but I already use it at work.
Which brings me to the last part of this blog post, release schedules! I’ll finally release a KDevelop 4.1.1 bug fix version next week, and will make sure that there is a 4.2 release just before / shortly after the KDE 4.6 release in January. The big “issue” there is that KDevelop 4.1 will not work with KDE 4.6+ , since there are no SmartRanges in Kate from 4.6 anymore. So a big fat warning to any adventurous tester out there: If you want to try KDE 4.6 betas, remember that you’ll have to get KDevelop master (== 4.2) as well somehow!
So, that’s it for now, have a nice sunday everyone :)
Comments
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Comment by rpedersen (not verified) (2010-11-24 21:36:00)
Great work!
You mentioned going through indentation test cases. Did you also look at Ruby tests? In that case, did you find any specific issues?
Comment by Milian Wolff (2010-11-27 21:56:00)
yes there are a quite a few expected fails, just run them to see that.
Comment by Mactalla (not verified) (2010-11-21 22:43:00)
Thanks for all your hard work on KDevelop. Seems every time I hit a bug you’re right there with a fix. (and lately I haven’t been running into any issues!) Kudos!
Comment by illissius (not verified) (2010-11-21 19:02:00)
Awesome. KDevelop really is a joy to use these days, even if I still only use it as a Kate on steroids… ;) (filesystem + konsole panels to open and compile/run/debug things). Maybe one of these days I’ll get around to figuring out the rest of it.