[FR-devel] My thoughts... (re-sending)

[Hal E. Fulton]

I think I may have sent this to an obsolete
mail list address... so I'm re-sending.
See below.

Cheers,
Hal


Hello, all.

Many thanks and much appreciation to
you who are making FreeRIDE happen.

So far I've been very unhelpful in the
development of FreeRIDE. But it's a 
project I believe in very much.

Two questions I have for the community
are:
1. What can we do to make installation
and configuration as painless as possible?
2. What subproject should I work on to
make a genuine contribution to FR?

To expand on this a little:

1. Painless installation
I'm a *huge* believer in this. Lately I
can't even get FOX to compile properly 
on RedHat 8. That means that I can't even
dream of using FXRuby, and thus can't 
begin to use FreeRIDE.
Normally I don't like to have my intelligence
insulted. But when it comes to installing
a software package, I say: Insult me! Give me
something so easy that a drooling idiot could
use it. Sure, I have a master's degree in 
computer science. That doesn't mean I always
want to go poking around in makefiles or shell
scripts or C source. I could probably fix it
given enough hours or days or weeks. But I
just want it to work simply, out of the box,
as advertised, no errors, no warnings, no
fine print.
And yes, I know that is easier said than done.
But it is a direction we should at least move
toward.
Where dependencies are concerned, we should
(perhaps) have code that will determine a) whether
a package is installed, b) what version it is,
and c) is this version adequate for this install.
I wouldn't mind seeing a tool that would actually
go to the net and grab the latest package and
install it. Maybe we could depend on an existing
tool like raainstall (though I haven't played
with that one much).


2. My understanding is that even if/when we 
ditch FOX, we'll still be married to Scintilla.
I've looked at the API for this, and it seems
rather obtuse to me. 
I can't help but feel there is room for at least
one, perhaps two levels of Rubyesque API on top
of Scintilla.
That's where I'm leaning toward wanting to work.
Comments? Laurent, Curt, Rich, anyone?
These levels would be used in two or three ways,
depending on how you look at it: 1. "Code assist"
stuff -- user types a partial statement and the
editor optionally responds with a fillable template
or some such thing. 2. Refactoring support. When 
refactoring is done, the code ultimately has to be
manipulated at the textual level. 3. Simple user
scripts such as shortcuts, templates, and macros.

Thoughts, anyone?

Hal