[MonoDevelop] Planning MonoDevelop 1.0

[Scott Ellington]

On Thu, 2006-11-23 at 00:28 +0100, Lluis Sanchez wrote:
>       * Debugger: I know a lot of people will ask for this, but I fear
>         the debugger won't be ready by our code freeze date. We can
>         release it later on as a separate add-in.
> 

I would consider holding off 1.0 until the debugger is ready.

>       * Documentation browser: The Monodoc integration more or less
>         works, but there are some known crashes. However I still believe
>         that showing Monodoc in an external window would be more
>         practical that the current integrated view. The integrated
>         documentation tree is not really useful, we don't have search or
>         an index integrated.
> 

I don't think I would remove functionality.  If people like it they can
use it.

>       * Welcome page: It looks ok to me.

One thing I thought of was adding a news section which would display the
Mono RSS feed.  That would be pretty cool.

>       * Autotools: There are several features I'd like to support for MD
>         1.0: 
>               * Support integration with existing Makefiles. That is, if
>                 somebody has a project with complex build rules which
>                 can't be emulated by MD, just make it possible to
>                 delegate the entire build process to Make, and still be
>                 able to launch the build from inside MD. About modifying
>                 the Makefile in MD, I think supporting adding/removing
>                 files would be enough for now. 

I assume you mean on deploy to tarball.  That wouldn't be too hard.
Just add a setting which prevents the overwriting of the current
autotools files.

>               * We need to find a solution for file templates (.in
>                 files). MD uses some of them. We need to support them in
>                 the MD build model if we want to be able to completely
>                 build MD using MD. 

yes that is a tough one.  I think you have to actually build it into the
MD project functionality.  I think the better solution would be to find
another way to do what you were doing with templates.

>               * There may be other missing features needed for
>                 self-hosting MD. 

likely.

>               * It would be nice to support generating a tarball without
>                 having to pollute the project directory with autotools
>                 files. 

yes it would.

> As you can see that's a lot of work. I think we should prioritize
> working on features related with development GNOME desktop applications
> (which has been the main goal of MD anyway).

The other things are the freedesktop *.desktop entries and MIME types
(as mentioned at http://www.monodevelop.com/Autotools ) which pertain
directly to developing GNOME applications.  We had discussed abstracting
this stuff into a DesktopTools addin, but I have recently started a new
job and have had little energies for additional coding.

Scott