[ptp-dev] My Photran plan for 8.0

[Jeffrey Overbey <jeffreyoverbey@xxxxxxx>]

A few weeks ago, Mariano (our newest Photran committer) asked me what I'm planning to do for Photran 8/Juno.  So, here's (kind of) an answer.  Note that these are my individual goals -- Mariano's working on other things, and Ralph has other plans -- so this isn't necessarily an agenda for the project as a whole.

1. Fix notorious open bugs and improve usability.  This is vague, intentionally.  But I'm tired of getting bug reports related to the MBS dependency calculator and the completely-oblivious-to-continuation-lines syntax highlighting.  Too many useful UI features depend on the painfully slow indexer.  And the New Project dialog couldn't be any harder to use.  We could save the users some type by replacing it with a menu item that picks random combinations of project types and toolchains until something works and deletes their entire Photran installation if nothing does.
2. Architectural and maintainability improvements.  This includes isolating CDT dependencies, so only the photran.cdtinterface and MBS plug-ins are dependent on CDT, and reducing the number of projects/plug-ins.  Also, I want to make the photran.doc.user content the "canonical" user's guide, rather than the wiki.
   
3. Commit pending contributions.  There are several patches in Bugzilla that need to be reviewed and committed, especially for new refactorings (31 isn't enough!)

Implicit in all of this is that someone else might have to take over responsibilities for the 2013 release (I'm pre-voting that the train be named "Kalyke"), and I want to work in a direction that will make that feasible.

For reference, you can get a list of all of the Bugzilla bugs targeted for 8.0 (including new features) using the link at the bottom of this e-mail.

Jeff

P.S. For anyone who *does* care about esoteric details of Photran's refactoring infrastructure, I recently finished my dissertation, which is good bedtime reading: http://jeff.over.bz/papers/2011/dissertation.pdf

*** Link to all 8.0-targeted bugs in Bugzilla:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced;component=Photran.Debugger%20%26%20Console%20View;component=Photran.Documentation;component=Photran.Editor%20%26%20Outline%20View;component=Photran.For%20Internal%20Use;component=Photran.Managed%20Make;component=Photran.Problems%20View%20%26%20Error%20Markers;component=Photran.Refactoring%20Engine;component=Photran.Unknown;component=Photran.Windows%20Installer%20%28.msi%20package%29;resolution=---;resolution=FIXED;resolution=DUPLICATE;target_milestone=8.0;product=PTP;classification=Tools