[cdt-dev] Extending CDT for Linux desktop development

[Seth Nickell <seth@xxxxxxxxx>]

I recently downloaded CDT 1.2 and am really impressed by progress CDT
has made. I'm interested in extending CDT to add support for various
systems/conventions used in developing Linux desktop applications (in
particular my goal is to make a good GNOME IDE, but many changes should
be beneficial to a broader audience). In particular, I'm interested in
working on the following extensions:

1) Support specifying compile and link flags using pkg-config
(http://freedesktop.org/Software/pkgconfig). pkg-config is a
Freedesktop.org system for libraries to specify the CFLAGS (-I etc) and
link flags (-L, -l, etc) necessary to use them. It makes it *much*
easier to develop applications that rely on a fairly deep dependency
stack. For example rather than needing to specify "-L/usr/X11R6/lib
-L/usr/lib -lX11 -lXext -lglib -lgtk -lgdk...and on and on" by hand with
pkg-config you can specify a dependency on "gtk+" and all the necessary
link/cflags will be pulled in.

A cursory look suggests that adding this feature would require adding
"dependency system" extension points to the managed make plugin, and
then writing a pkg-config dependency plugin that uses that extension
point. Maybe people already have a concept of how this should work?

2) Support gtk-doc for inline help on functions and types. Very similar
to javadoc support in JDT.

3) Add plugins for basic skeleton code project types for doing a desktop
library, GNOME application, etc.

4) Something that would be good long term but I doubt I'll have time to
work on in the short term is to add full GNU autoconf/automake support.
This would benefit a lot of *nix projects that might consider using CDT
but want to retain a standard build system.

Thoughts, comments, and warnings of dire failure appreciated ;-)

-Seth