Re: IDE

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org> writes:

> David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:
>>
>> I got rid of it because it tended to eat all my CPU repeatedly digging
>> through buffers and files in the background.  I don't want some tool to
>> go treasure-hunting for hours in my directories without concrete cause,
>> then restart for inscrutable reasons.
>>
>> It had its own idea of projects not matching the projects I was working
>> with, and it's an absolute no-go for Emacs to meddle with project
>> organization: I want to be able to jump in with Emacs into any project
>> without any pre- or post-configuration.
>>
>> Maybe that's a decisive difference between what people got to expect
>> from an IDE and I expect from Emacs: if someone develops stuff in Visual
>> C++, everybody in the project is expected to use the project
>> organization tools of the Visual C++ IDE.  But I don't want my choice of
>> Emacs as an editor bleed all over a project.
>
> That means CEDET needs to recognize your Visual C++ project, just like
> the Visual C++ IDE does. CEDET does not currently support this.

Uh, no?  I don't think I ever used Visual C++.  Projects I work on use
Makefiles if anything.  Or some other build infrastructure.

So if CEDET needs project information, its first idea of getting it
should be to look at some toplevel Makefiles and, if it finds them, ask
GNU Make for dependencies and stuff and probably look at a few standard
Make targets.  That's what to expect in GNU projects, the most important
clientele.

But I don't think it should ever get foraging for stuff on its own.

>> Now you'll say that EDE (or Semantic, or whatever other component) is
>> entirely optional but it's hard to figure out just what the relations
>> of the various parts of CEDET are.  If you want to just work with the
>> code you have and not get stuff messed up, at some point of time it's
>> easier to just forego the whole inscrutable package and simplify
>> one's life.
>
> You seem to be implying that something in CEDET was changing things on
> the disk without your permission; is that what you are actually
> saying?

No.  I was saying

>> I got rid of it because it tended to eat all my CPU repeatedly
>> digging through buffers and files in the background.  I don't want
>> some tool to go treasure-hunting for hours in my directories without
>> concrete cause, then restart for inscrutable reasons.

Is there any reason to assume I mean something different when I write
stuff like that?

>> Again, that's a main difference to what a normal IDE is doing: it
>> tends to focus on a small set of languages and does them well when I
>> buy into the IDE, and I can use IDE features as needed.
>
> It's more than just the language; it's also the build tools and cross
> reference tools, and the associated configuration files.

Whatever.  I wrote why I got rid of CEDET, you answer that the world is
difficult for an IDE.  That's nice but irrelevant.  I'm fine with only
requiring those services of an IDE which it can provide without being
painful to me.  If I don't get any obvious way to choose, if it's "take
it all or leave it", then the probability is that I'll settle on the
"leave it" option.

-- 
David Kastrup