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Re: [imp-dev] Use of org.eclipse.zest in pdb.ui
Actually, as I see it, there's a significant *skilled* user base that probably 
wouldn't bother installing GEF, were it not for such a dependency. I
usually don't install it, for want of any compelling reason.

Also, one good general principle is "the fewer dependencies, the
better" (all other things being equal).

That said, looking at the GEF download site, the size of Zest + Draw2D
is around 3M, while for all of GEF is about 8M, so that's arguably not a
huge difference (compared to the rest of the Eclipse SDK). And you're
probably right that including all of GEF is more user-friendly than
requiring just a part of it.
So, IMHO it's fine for pdb.ui to depend on GEF, but I'd still like to put 
the pdb UI code in a separate feature with the appropriate feature-
level dependencies.

Remember, the default/generic visualizations in pdb.ui will probably
be more useful for development and debugging of IDEs than for the
end-users of the IDEs.

On Feb 4, 2009, at 12:04 PM, Ed Willink wrote:


Hi

Is there a significant unskilled user base that needs to not have GEF?
There are numerous projects that depend on GEF so surely everyone has it. 

Requiring only half of GEF is more confusing than requiring all of it.

	Regards

		Ed Willink


-----Original Message-----
From: imp-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:imp-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Robert M. Fuhrer
Sent: 04 February 2009 14:12
To: IMP Developers List
Subject: Re: [imp-dev] Use of org.eclipse.zest in pdb.ui


Hi Jurgen,

No question that a zest dependency is superior to the
cmd-line graphviz
dependency. Somehow I was under the impression that draw2d was
part of SWT itself (just naive hope, I guess).

I don't think it makes sense to extract the
graph-visualization code to
another plugin, since it's the main bit of functionality in
the plugin
as
it is (as you said).

At the same time, it may make sense to extract pdb.ui to another
feature,
so that people can have the core analysis representation and
computation code without dragging in GEF, if they have no need for
visualization beyond tables and lists.

On Feb 4, 2009, at 2:57 AM, Jurgen Vinju wrote:


Hi Bob,

Well, Zest depends on draw2d which is a part of GEF, and the
DirectedGraphLayout algorithm, which is also used by GraphViz' dot
tool, is a part of draw2d.
I consider this a superior alternative to having a dependency on
graphviz commandline tools, or to implementing the layout algorithm
again ourselves.
I have also understood from the authors of Zest that pieces

of it are

sometimes moved to draw2d if deemed necessary.

We could factor uit the graph dependent code to a new project called
pdb.ui.graph. On the other hand, I'm not sure that would
help since the graph drawing is what is most useful anyway.

Cheers,

Jurgen

On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 1:13 AM, Robert M. Fuhrer

<rfuhrer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

wrote:
Hi Jurgen,

Is Zest part of GEF, or can it be obtained separately? I'd

like to

avoid
making pdb.ui dependent on something as large as GEF, but not,
of course, if there's no good alternative...


--
Cheers,
  - Bob
-------------------------------------------------
Robert M. Fuhrer
Research Staff Member
Programming Technologies Dept.
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

IMP Project Lead (http://www.eclipse.org/imp)
X10: Productivity for High-Performance Parallel Programming (http://x10.sf.net )

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