[platform-debug-dev] Automatic view management: the perspective problem

["Jared Burns" <jaredburns@xxxxxxx>]

As far as I know, the only remaining sticky issue with our automatic view  
management story (via contexts) is the problem where the Debug
view can sometimes open views in perspectives you don't want it to.

The classic example is when you're in the Java perspective and your  
program suspends. We pop up a dialog that asks if you want to switch
to the debug perspective. If you say "No" we then open the Debug view in  
your current perspective (configurable via preference). Because
of the debugger's Debug-view-centric approach, it makes sense to open the  
view. However, a side effect is that the Debug view then opens
all the debug views, cluttering your Java perspective with views you might  
not want.

To address this problem, I'd like to create an association between the  
automatic view management and perspectives. Instead of just
saying Yes or No to view management, you'd be able to specify which  
perspectives you want views managed in. By default, we'd only manage
views in the Debug perspective. Addressing scalability concerns in the  
Debug perspective was the primary motivation for this feature in
the first place, so I think this is a fair default.

Proposed changes:
1. Add a "View Management" preference page containing a checkbox table  
viewer to allow the user to select perspectives that we should
mess with.
2. Remove the "Manage Views" toggle button from the Debug toolbar. Because  
of space concerns, this has already been proposed separately.
3. Replace the "Manage Views" toggle action in the context menu with a  
"View Management..." action in the Debug view pulldown menu. The
action would open the preference dialog to the View Management preference  
page.

I expect that this should take no more than three days to implement and  
would be a significant usability improvement for our view
management story.

Good/bad/ugly?

Thanks.
- Jared