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What Tools Do FLOSS Developers Need?

Posted by Soulskill on from the does-soda-count-as-a-tool dept.

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?"

9 of 310 comments (clear)

  1. Visual Studio replacement on Linux by sopssa · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

    1. Re:Visual Studio replacement on Linux by SSpade · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'll take Qt Creator over Visual Studio for C++ development any day.

    2. Re:Visual Studio replacement on Linux by cjcela · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Visual Studio replacement on Linux by Mongoose+Disciple · · Score: 4, Interesting

      IMHO, Eclipse is a great example of what's wrong with Open Source software from a usability perspective -- to be reasonably productive with Eclipse, you probably need a bunch of plug-ins, a bunch of time tweaking the preferences, someone who's spent years using it, and probably all of the above. Possibly you also need twice the memory (or more) of just about any other option to run at a reasonable speed for no apparent reason.

      I'm interested in coding; I'm not interested in spending a bunch of time fighting my IDE to do it, and when I think about the years I spent using Eclipse, that's basically what I remember. Other people have a different experience with it and I won't say they're wrong, but that's what it was like for me.

  2. hmmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    A dentists chair and some teeth?

    (bad joke i know)

  3. Code what you know best by bramp · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Documentation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Editors and Debuggers by Microlith · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    Get a real kernel debugger INTO the linux kernel. DO it now

    Last I looked KGDB worked quite well, and it behaves in a very similar fashion to Windows when being debugged.

    For that matter dbg could use a little update

    You mean GDB? What "new things" could be added?

  6. Re:Editors and Debuggers by MrMr · · Score: 4, Funny

    Clippy