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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?"
You should code whatever you need. If you code something others need, you will either do it wrong, or get bored. Do what you know best.
I'll take Qt Creator over Visual Studio for C++ development any day.
API references aren't enough. Need rational, best practices, meaningful examples and references. Tutorials aren't terribly useful because they are inherently limited to cases that are easily teachable. OpenSSL is a fine specimen; crucial parts of the API are omitted from the current, maintained documentation. These can only be found in the archived SSLeay documentation, and that amounts to a spotty collection of notes.
(yes, I've paid for the books, too)
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
My biggest problem with much of OSS is that the documentation is terrible. Try figuring out what the *right* way to do a "poll" type call on Linux is, or how to configure clustering with Geronimo and you will quickly realize that outside of reading the code there is almost NO good documentation on how to do more advanced things with open source software.
Anyone that claims they aren't hasn't bothered to use the tools available to them. It's entirely possible to get equivalent context-awareness going in VIM/Emacs, but since they aren't packaged as a whole people write them off as being "obsolete" or somesuch nonsense.
Last I looked KGDB worked quite well, and it behaves in a very similar fashion to Windows when being debugged.
You mean GDB? What "new things" could be added?
Git, mercurial, monotone, etc. are all ready nice, and do pretty much the same thing, but it's annoying to have to use the one that the project leader decides on. It would be nice (if it's possible) to be able to pick which one you want to use as a client, and have it work with whatever the project manager wants to use for the upstream repository. I'm not sure what all this would encompass, probably some common distribution (push/pull) protocol would need to be implemented by all the different SCMs..
I agree. Visual Studio is by far the best out there, and it is painful not to have something comparable available in other platforms (I currently use OSX/Linux). I've been steadily moving away from proprietary tools and frameworks for the last 3 or 4 years, and it is a painful process. Eclipse is mostly good (excellent for Java), but when developing in C++, its debugger is not great. Same goes for Netbeans. They are 90% there, but the remaining 10% is so frustrating that makes large projects a pain. I am considered moving to Codelite instead, which feels to me a bit more like Visual Studio 6, and has much better debugger support for C++. On the down side, Codelite tends to be quirky on OSX.