What Tools Do FLOSS Developers Need?

An anonymous reader writes "I am a free software developer; I maintain one relatively simple project written in C, targeted at end users, but I feel that I could contribute something more to the FLOSS community than my project. Instead of focusing on another project targeted at end users, I thought that I could spend my time working on something FLOSS developers need ('Developers, developers, developers, developers!'). The question is: what more do FLOSS developers need from existing development tools? What would attract new developers to existing FLOSS development tools? Which existing development tools need more attention? I can contribute code in C, Python and bash, but I can also write documentation, do testing and translate to my native language. Any hints?"

Comments

Editors and Debuggers

[MerlynEmrys67]

Anyone that claims either vi or emacs is a useful editor hasn't used a modern Windows IDE. Just the amount of context aware help that is available about the platform is amazing.

Get a real kernel debugger INTO the linux kernel. DO it now - I hate having to patch the heck out of my kernel just to see what some module that I am unfamiliar with works. I know I know - Linus doesn't like debuggers. Well, hate to say it but he is wrong. There is no substitute for watching your code run on the platform in real time.

For that matter dbg could use a little update - it is what 30 years old now, getting closer to 40. There are a lot of new things that need to be included.