Re: Porting DDD to 2011

[Giovanni Campagna]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 3:23 PM, Andreas Zeller
<zeller@cs.uni-saarland.de> wrote:
> Hi Giovanni,
> On 2010-08-16, at 15:02, Giovanni Campagna wrote:
>
> As an hobbyist programmer and regional IOI contestant, I found that a
> debugger is one of my best friends. Of course, gdb is somehow spiky to
> use directly, so I learned to use and love DDD.
> DDD has some unique features, in particular in the data visualization
> part, but now it needs some UI refresh to be up to date and up to the
> competion
> Not only porting to Gtk+ (possibly GTK3 and cairo, or even Clutter for
> the data display), but also adapting to the GNOME HIG (and possibly
> integrating fully with the GNOME Developer Stack, like Anjuta and
> Devhelp).
>
> Since I saw from Savannah that this is a desired goal for DDD, I'd
> like to contribute, but I need some information about current
> maintainers to contact, source tree (SVN looks dead, a migration to
> GIT would be appreciated), coding language and style, patch and
> copyright policies and other relevant details.
>
> The current DDD maintainer is Peter Wainwright <peter dot wainwright at ieee
> dot org>, so you may wish to contact him directly.

Thanks for the pointer, I will.

> Porting DDD to another GUI toolkit is certainly a desirable goal.  However,
> you'll find that DDD is very much tied to its GUI toolkit, much more than
> modern design principles would advocate.  (At the time DDD was written,
> OSF/Motif and Athena were pretty much the only GUI toolkits in town, and
> design patterns as well as abstraction between presentation and
> functionality were not invented yet.)  Take a look at the DDD code and
> you'll find it is pretty much to maintain, let alone port.

I imagined so, given the age of the program and the last time a commit
was checked in.

> If you want to bring DDD to 2011, I would actually recommend to write a
> debugger from scratch based on modern toolkits.  You may be able to extract
> some reusable parts (such as the data visualization) from DDD.

Well... rewriting from scratch or refactoring completely doesn't look
that different. And I think that DDD has a lot more than UI (for
example it supports a lot of different backends). So I am still going
with a DDD 4.0, even if the UI will be rewritten completely.

Giovanni