[Soc-coordination] Summer of Code Ideas

[Chris Baines]

Hi Arthur,

On Fri, 2011-02-11 at 23:18 +0100, Obey Arthur Liu wrote:
> One way I would see this implementable without unreasonable amount of
> work and with immediate improvement over some existing workflows is to
> write an Eclipse plugin.

That sounds quite interesting, I am quite comfortable programming in
Java and have used Eclipse almost exclusively as an IDE before.

> This solution avoids having to reinvent the IDE parts of the tool by
> leveraging the quite decent aspects of Eclipse.

That sounds good!

> Now you're going to tell me that few people even consider doing Debian
> packaging using Eclipse, but I'd retort that the Eclipse framework is
> probably the only one were such work would make sense (compared to an
> Emacs mode or a Vim plugin).

Not only that, but it would help applications developers who use Eclipse
to develop too quickly produce and test Debian packages in a more
familiar environment. 

> I think that such a plugin can have a lot of potential to integrate
> the many packaging tools available to Debian developers, including:
> git-buildpackage, lintian, pbuilder, dput, mini-dinstall...
> Besides this, Eclipse brings VCS integration (SVN, Git, Hg...), syntax
> coloring, auto-formatting (and that could include control files
> someday! possibly using Config::Model)...
> Examples across the industry have shown that it is possible to create
> very good Eclipse plugins dedicated to specific development
> environment (I'm thinking about Android, Java App Engine/GWT and
> countless others). These are so polished that they have been able to
> attract developers that would usually never use Eclipse. 

I used a basic Eclipse plugin when using the Lejos NXJ project, it was a
big help with improving usability.

> I believe we can do a comparably good job by leveraging and visually
> integrating the existing Debian packaging tools. 

This was what I had in mind, would this be something that you would
consider accepting to the program, even though its strongly related to
Eclipse?

Chris



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