Re: [photran] Where to focus development efforts

["Erlend Pedersen :." <erlend.pedersen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2008-02-06 at 19:01 -0600, Jeffrey Overbey wrote:
> For help in planning our official, Eclipse-approved, non-beta release of 
> Photran later this year and future releases, we would like some input 
> from the community.

Yey! I will toss in my wishes and complaints here, then. :)

> What functionality is most conspicuously missing from Photran?

Code completion
Scan my code (heeding preprocessor directives like #define and
#include), determine the names and types of routines and parameters,
then provide a list of possible code completions as I type.

Code navigation
Ctrl+left click (or better yet, a keyboard shortcut), on a function name
opens up the file containing said function and moves the cursor to it.

Code comment popup
Present comment immediately preceding the function definition when the
mouse hovers over a function name. Make sure the popup does not occlude
the code it is documenting. In well-documented code, this means that you
won't have to navigate to the function in order to determine what it
does.

And, as a bottom priority:

Sanity checks
Notify me as I type if I'm trying to shove a real as a parameter where
an integer is expected, or if I'm writing to an intent(in) dummy
parameter in a subroutine somewhere. Red underlines in code wherever
what I'm doing should result in a trivial compilation error.

> What existing features are sub-par?

Outline
Borked for certain bits of code (though it is much better than it used
to be!). Specifically, it seems to be allergic to anything requiring a
preprocessor (I interface with C code and must use custom C types), and
using derived types in IO functions (open( unit=handle%lu )).

Closing a project
I consistently get an error of "Synchronizing Photran VGP".

Refactoring
Never worked for me. But for me, refactoring is only a "nice to have,
but not really important" bit. At least until other bits of Photran work
better.

> What can we do to make Photran more appealing and approachable to new users?

Big bundle
Making sure that there always exists some kind of big bundle that
installs all you need, and sets it up for you, including Eclipse and a
build chain.

Update sites
Use Eclipse's built-in update tool instead of having the user download
and unzipping stuff.


Best regards,
Erlend Pedersen :.