[cdt-dev] CDT Customer Feedback

[Thomas Fletcher <ThomasF@xxxxxxx>]

In the monthly calls, I've often made a comment about sharing the customer
feedback information which some of the commercial "CDT re-sellers" are 
receiving.  Since we are starting to put together the 2.0 plan, I thought
that it would be a good time for me to provide some of the common feedback
that we get from customers during their "early days" (ie within the first
few days of working with the tools before they find work-arounds and start
to go silent about problems that they are encountering).

The list is rather long, but I've shortened it to stuff which I feel is
most relevant to CDT (as opposed to Eclipse and/or QNX) and here is what
I ended up with:

---

Overall comments: Project organization and ease of source manipulation
has a _huge_ _huge_ impact on the adoption of these tools

- Importing source and building/organizing projects is non-trivial
  and non-obvious. There are many difficulties in dealing with 
  custom project structures.

- Lack of control over build and ability to customize.
  Specifically:
  - Custom mix of debug and non-debug per component (ie file)
  - Ability to rebuild (not link) just a single file to check
    for errors.
  - Support for both binary and source dependancies and building
    and linking only what is required. 

- Build is too slow in the IDE compared to the commnd line.  The
  output parsing and console windows seem to cause an enormous
  penalty.  Suggestion is to push results to a temporary file on
  disk and process it seperately rather than "in-line".

- Binding of keys/buttons for build commands, including custom
  commands.  In general key binding is a touchy issue =;-)

- Don't want to have to do additional Makefile manipulation
  by editing files (want preferences to cover everything).

- Memory and performance overhead for large projects (100,000+ 
  files) is unacceptable.  "More caching and less working" I
  believe were one customers direct words.

- Want a simple, single click mechanism to build and debug 
  applications.

- Lack of source nagivation and cross referencing tools.
  Specifically:
  - C++ Class browsing functionality
  - Opening of C++ types (typed in)
  - Opening of C functions (typed in)
  - Jumping from variables to declarations (cursor in source)
  - Jumping to function definitions (cursor in source)
  - Toggling from source to header definitions
  
- Lack of coherent and consistant code completion.
  Specifically:
  - Missing completions from local project or included files
  - Local variable completion 
  - Structure and Class member completion
  - Pre-processor completion (ie #define, #include ...)

- Integrated documentation support to enhance code completion
  (format agnostic, but Javadoc/Doxygen styles have been requested)