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

Visual Studio replacement on Linux

[sopssa]

Visual Studio is the favorite IDE for lots of programmers and without a doubt still the one thats considered best there is.

However I've started doing some Linux programming along with other languages that could be developed on Linux (PHP, Delphi/Kylix). However the IDE's I've tested dont seem to compare with Visual Studio or even Delphi's IDE. In most cases they're mostly somewhat advanced text editors and building and debugging is more inconvenient. They just dont feel like complete IDE's where you can do your work. Is there such professional suites available on Linux and if not, what could be done to improve the existing IDE's and tools to that level?

Re:Visual Studio replacement on Linux

[Akido37]

Eclipse doesn't work for you?

Re:Visual Studio replacement on Linux

[teeks99]

I tried this out for the first time a couple weeks ago (after several years of Visual Studio usage) and was very hopeful...however I left feeling that it wasn't quite finished all the way. I got the impression that it was just a bunch of tools glued together with a rapid-development type GUI framework.

That said, I was quite pleased with it overall. I definitely will strongly consider using it next time I start a project. For my two cents, I think this is a great example of what the author is looking for, a tool that will help FLOSS developers that could use a bit more help :-)

Re:Visual Studio replacement on Linux

[Microlith]

Can you edit and continue when working with C++ or C#?

While it is an interesting feature, changing code at runtime always seemed suspect to me. I don't know if it's possible at all in Linux, and I know it's not possible in Windows if you're targeting a 64-bit platform.

Re:Visual Studio replacement on Linux

[HeadSoft]

Code::Blocks is a good one for Linux, it's not quite Visual Studio but it has most of the same features, the ones you actually use on a regular basis. I haven't tried the Windows version, but I know one exists as well.

Re:Visual Studio replacement on Linux

[V!NCENT]

Code::Blocks is what you are looking for. http://www.codeblocks.org/

Re:Visual Studio replacement on Linux

[HeronBlademaster]

What third party libraries in particular make Intellisense die? I know Boost can sometimes make Intellisense bog down, but my experience is that the only thing that never worked *properly* has been anonymous namespaces. Even pointer accesses on boost::smart_ptr worked right. I worked for a year or so on a million-plus-line-of-code MFC C++ application using VS 2003 and then VS 2005 (before 2008 came out), and I never had a problem with third-party libraries (of which we used several), as long as you let Intellisense finish loading when you open the project. There's a progress bar and everything, it's not hard to see.

Re:Visual Studio replacement on Linux

[TheFranz]

I'd like to claim the exact oposite of what you are claiming. The Intellisense (intellinonsense / intellisenseless) get worse for C++ with every release of Visual Studio. For 2005 it was workable but 2008 is completely backwards. I fear what they did with it in VS2010.
If I use boost for instance VS doesn't know how to begin with providing me the first bit of information in intellisense relating to boost. even worse: it stops "intellisensing" for other code i've written completely!

To make intellisense work for us with C++ we use the Visual Assistant plugin. And for C# we also use resharper: this adds all the eclipse niceness to Visual Studio except the "find types". That great feature is still missing, or I haven't located it yet. However this make Visual Studio need 2 plugins to work well.

Perhaps if you check out a recent version of CDT all the proplems you mentioned are gone: CDT seems to be a very active project. I had no problems with debugging in eclipse CDT with GDB (after spending countless hours getting it to work with KDevelop)

So for now I can only recommend Eclipse CDT as IDE for Linux C++ app development (having only checked out Kdevelop and Eclipse CDT)

FLOSS

[Anonymous Coward]

FLOSS stands for "Free/Libre Open Source Software". I have not seen it with the "Libre" added in there before, so I'm sure others have not as well. Great job spelling it out the first time you use it, Slashdot.

Re:Editors and Debuggers

[arevos]

SLIME does not hold a candle to VS sorry.

I can think of plenty of features that SLIME has, but VS does not. However, I can't think of any feature in VS that is not matched by either Emacs itself, SLIME or some other extension.

Could you explain why you think VS is better?