Anonymous - 2004-01-10

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user_id=937473

Hi Cris
Yes that's a fine concept to follow-up. I also believe
that it is a very broad topic for IDE integration. Tonight I had
an encounter with a lame 'refactoring' issue. And I have a
couple of ideas for 'small' tools to get to the final end-point.

I wanted to re-build the gawk project with Dev-Cpp. It was
a non-trivial task as it turned out. No sweat, just tiresome.
A few things that would have assisted me are:

  1. IMPORT a make file.
    -- Dev-Cpp has an IMPORT of MSVC project files, a
    makefile Import would need to be a smarter version
    of this. (I'm being ironic, it is non-simple, especially
    if one wishes to NOT re-invent 'make').
    -- There would need to be some structural additions to
    Dev-Cpp to make things like this easier. Suggestions
    might be an ADD-IN interface, to integrate new
    menu options. Or a wizard interface, allowing people
    to supply scripts or wizards for the the IDE.

  2. Order of INCLUDE files.
    -- The first thing I discovered is that the gawk
    regex.h file with the gnu project doesn't work.
    I had to break my 'compile options' to explicitly
    specify the order of header files for the project.
    -- When refacroring, I find that placing an experiment
    header or source file (C or CPP) into a "sandbox"
    directory is a better way to 'trial' things. To
    effectively do this, the INCLUDE path needs to be
    modifiable on a per- folder, file or pjoject basis.

  3. Project Options
    -- I can specify individual file options in the Project
    Options dialogue.
    -- It would be very useful if that can be extended to
    the Dev-CPP folders as logical 'groups'.

  4. Configurations / Builds
    -- There needs to be a way to configure the 'make' for
    different congigurations. For example is the MS
    Visual Studio thing for DEBUG-UNICODE and
    RELEASE-UNICODE kind of configurations.
    -- Now, oddly enough, if one had a SYSTEM for the
    'IMPORT' of makefiles; then examples might be ...

          make mingw-debug
      make windows
      make cross-unix

    Would be "configurations".  I would definitely vote 
    for a modular make-approach too.  Like each 
    configuration as a shell for a common make file.

XX. Maybe there is a need for a better make, a more
object oriented that can apply a "style sheet" against
a base-makefile ???

(I didn't number that last comment because it is not
especially an idea who's time has come yet. Althought it
would be a wonderful tool for simplification.)

Good idea.

Regards, Will.