[Mono-osx] [MonoDevelop] State of MonoDevelop on the Mac

[Steve.Mentzer at lw.com]

One thing that strikes me as being of paramount importance for
assistance on the mac platform is having a viable monodevelop build
strategy on the mac. From what I gather, the current monodevelop/mac
builds are either generated or assisted by a linux environment.

Is it possible to build monodevelop from svn/source on a 10.5 box? If
so, are there any documented steps for doing so? 

Some of the integration issues below could be triaged and/or resolved
more effectively if folks could produce stable builds natively within
os/x.

Of course, if this is just crazy talk, and there are just too many
issues building on os/x, tell me know and I will return to my rock
under the bridge...   :)


------------------------------

Message: 5
Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2009 09:14:19 -0600
From: Bryan Murphy <bmurphy1976 at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Mono-osx] [MonoDevelop] State of MonoDevelop on the Mac
To: Michael Hutchinson <m.j.hutchinson at gmail.com>
Cc: MonoDevelop List <Monodevelop-list at lists.ximian.com>,
	monodevelop-devel-list
<Monodevelop-devel-list at lists.ximian.com>,
	mono-osx at lists.ximian.com
Message-ID:
	<7fd310d10902210714o2c376432le321495d6533678d at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 3:21 AM, Michael Hutchinson
<m.j.hutchinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I've been fixing up the Mac MD in the last few days, trying to
> identify what needs to be resolved to polish it up.

I can't help you much with the key bindings.  I find my mac to be
infuriatingly inconsistent when it comes to key bindings across
applications, so I don't know what the "correct" bindings are really
supposed to be anyway.  Windows is far more consistent.

That being said, your list looks very good.  There are a few things
I've noticed that bother me:

* Window drawing/refresh issues (as you mentioned, but they are very
bad right now)

* In tree views and menus, your current item doesn't always highlight
(probably related to the window refresh issue)

* Dialog boxes open in the upper left corner of the screen.  This is
annoying because I have my dock on the left and the dialogs always
appear under the dock.

* I had to delete my ~/.config/MonoDevelop folder to get this build to
load.  Before I did that, I was getting the following error on
startup: LSOpenFromURLSpec() failed with error -10810

I only downloaded the newest build last night.  I haven't looked at
MonoDevelop on mac in months so I'll post more as I re-familiarize
myself with it and use it.

Bryan


------------------------------

Message: 6
Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2009 18:02:58 +0100
From: Nicholas Francis <Nicholas at unity3d.com>
Subject: Re: [Mono-osx] [MonoDevelop] State of MonoDevelop on the Mac
To: Michael Hutchinson <m.j.hutchinson at gmail.com>
Cc: MonoDevelop List <Monodevelop-list at lists.ximian.com>,
	monodevelop-devel-list
<Monodevelop-devel-list at lists.ximian.com>,
	mono-osx at lists.ximian.com
Message-ID: <BEB04D13-3DAE-481F-9B98-89A0BD80072D at unity3d.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes

Hi Michael.

Your bug list sort-of matches what I've noticed.

I'm the lead UI guy from Unity - We are currently moving Unity from  
Mac-only to Mac and PC, so we've actually gone through the process of

picking our brains about everything that was natural to Mac users.  
After we ship WindowsUnity (soon, I pray), I'd love to help out with  
doing some keybindings to make it feel nice for a Machead (after all,

I did our text editing system, so I have our keymapping tables for  
text editing).

In general we're very open to figuring out how we make sure that  
MonoDevelop becomes a great app on Mac.

Cheers,
Nicholas

On 21/02/2009, at 10.21, Michael Hutchinson wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I've been fixing up the Mac MD in the last few days, trying to
> identify what needs to be resolved to polish it up.
>
> I've set up a minimal bit of dock and menu integration (click on
dock
> to unminimise, fix the dock quit command, that sort of thing), fixed
> the pkgconfig lookup (so all the Mono packages, including GTK# show
> up), and tidied up the configure scripts. On the build side, I set
up
> the makefiles so that I can easily generate a MonoDevelop.app.zip
file
> on Linux, which can be downloaded and run directly. I also made sure
> it's easy to build and run MD from SVN from within MD on the Mac
(open
> & hit "run").
>
> Encouraging progress, maybe, but there's still much to be done. The
MD
> team isn't going to work on this for the upcoming 2.0 release, since
> we're focusing on Linux stability. The 2.0 release for OS X will
still
> be a preview. After 2.0 we will be able to focus more on improving
the
> usability and stability of MonoDevelop on the Mac and Windows.
>
> A lot of this, especially key binding stuff, cannot easily be done
by
> those of us who are not Mac users, as we just don't know how typical
> Mac keybindings are expected to *feel*. Help and advice from Mac
> developers would be much appreciated. Even if you fix just one of
> these things, that means together we get more of it sorted out,
> faster. I'd be happy to advise anyone on how to get started.
>
> Here's my summary of the current state of things I'm aware of that
> need to be fixed.
>
> Redraw issues:
> * File chooser's file list
>  - GTK+ bug: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=550939
> * Tree view's selection and expander arrow
>  - GTK+ bug
> * MD text editor's text
>  - This may be fixable in MD itself, or might be a GTK+ bug
>
> Key binding issues
> * Good default Mac keybinding scheme
> * Ability to bind Command
>  - It seems to show up as Alt right now
> * Reliable capture of keys for keybindings
>  - Can't capture F keys - OS is grabbing them?
>  - Widget mnemonics seem to override key capture - GTK+ issue?
> * Display keybindings using Mac-style symbols
>  - In key binding manager and menus
> * Key bindings for GTK+ built-in widgets
>  - GTK+ bug & patch:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=530351
> * Review all places that MD code uses key modifiers, e.g. completion
> window, expanding text selection, etc. and make sure they can be
made
> Mac-like
>
> Global menu integration
> * IGE menu integration library is very limited, so currently
disabled
>  - Can't display menu items with embedded labels, which we use for
> displaying our accelerators, since we don't use GTK accelerator
> infrastructure
>  - Doesn't display radio or check items
>  - Doesn't display icons
>  - Doesn't update sensitivity
>  - Reported to be very broken with menus that are dynamically
updated
> * Proposed solution: Write a CarbonMenu# binding (P/Invoke, should
be
> pretty easy) and use it to turn a CommandEntrySet into a Carbon menu
> directly
>
> Misc
> * Right-click emulation with Control-click
>  - GTK+ bug & patch:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=346609
> * Modal dialogs don't stay on top
> * Text position shifts while it's selected, even with Monospaced  
> fonts.
>  - Mostly a MD kerning bug, but monospace issues may be
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=569146
> * Dock integration
>  - Some basics done, but would be useful to be able to add commands

> to the menu
> * File handlers integration
>  - Ffetch list of handlers for given mime types, for "open with"  
> context menu
> * Recent files list integration
>  - Currently use the FreeDesktop ~/.recently-used file, which still
> works for MD
>
> Drag-n-drop
> * Buggy, with a lot of unimplemented features needed by the GTK#  
> designer
> * http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=559904
> * http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501588
> * Shift-drag: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=569145
>
> Misc. disabled addins
> * Gettext addin - not sure why
> * SVN addin - needs testing, svn binding reportedly very unstable on

> Mac
> * GtkCore designer - missing drag-n-drop in GTK+, no dllmaps,  
> probably more
> * Database addin - should work now it no longer uses GtkSourceView,

> but untested
> * Boo binding - boo console uses GtkSourceView. Port or disable this

> feature.
> * Moonlight/Silverlight - developer libraries not present (also a
> problem on Linux)
> * Python, Vala, Java - totally untested
>
> Open GTK+ Quartz bugs can be seen here:
>
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?query=component:quartz+product:g
tk%2B+
>
> It would be useful to isolate the GTK/GDK issues and file bugs
against
> GTK. We can fairly easily apply patches to the GTK+ that Mono ships,
> making things better for all GTK# apps.
>
> -- 
> Michael Hutchinson
> http://mjhutchinson.com
> _______________________________________________
> Monodevelop-list mailing list
> Monodevelop-list at lists.ximian.com
> http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/monodevelop-list



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