Slashdot Mirror
SGI Releases IDE
johnrpenner writes " SGI has released "Jessie" - an open source development environment for Linux. It provides an advanced IDE (integrated application environment) with comprehensive debugging tools and a highly graphical interface that eliminates the need for employing older command-line tools." However there doesn't seem to be linkage to anything more than a press release.Update: 09/21 11:41 by H : Check SGI's Jessie site for more information.
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/jessie/
Point me to a decent, preferably open source, Java debugger and I will add the Java support. I started doing the support based on JDB, but found it came up, well, "a little short".
-Dean
thanks
You do know that gcc works for 5.3 WITHOUT the IDO.
l
Download gcc
http://reality.sgi.com/ariel/freeware/
Download header & linker
http://www.interlog.com/~kcozens/sgi/gcc-irix.htm
Done, No fuss No muss.
The project overview claims:"The Linux development community currently lacks a definitive integrated development environment (IDE)...". ***This is FALSE*** Nirvana Editor or XEMACS are here already and do the job just fine.
It currently does C/C++, Java, and Ada. If you add the other languages, please please please send them back to us.
Add more languages to the syntax highlighting is quite easy and I can give you the simple instructions offline, if you wish.
-Dean
Read the licence more closely, they can revoke your binary or source licence at any time.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
To RMS, they Qt Free Edition licencing is fine. It has a similar effect to releasing Qt under the GPL --- RMS doesn't promote commercial software at all.
Also, the person/group who "Rubber Stamps" "Open Source Licences" is the OSI at opensource.org.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
It is possible for there to be a Free UNIX for Emacs to run on. There is no Free Java, and I'm not sure that there legally *can* be one.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
I believe that Kaffe (www.kaffe.org) is "free", done in a clean room fashion.
-Dean
The key word that I believe you skipped over is definitive. At the rollout of Jessie, it said that there were no IDE's, but that was false because a bunch had just been released, such as CodeWarrior, and I changed the wording to reflect that.
XEMACS isn't an IDE in the truest sense, it is a great editor with the ability to run tools from it. If that were considered an IDE, vi and tcsh (or bash) could also be considered an IDE. I don't know anything about the Nirvana editor, so I won't comment on it.
Jessie exists, runs, and you can get the code for it. There is still a lot of functionality to be added to it, but by giving it to the world, we are explicitly looking for input on what functionality is important.
-Dean
Then quit you complaining and look around. 6.x contains all the stuff you need. If you want to go 4+ years back (I can't even remember what ancient Linux kernel that would be... ugh can you imagine?) you can use gcc for 5.3 (info at bottom), and if you don't feel inclined to call SGI for their FREE cd with the headers, download the header/linker file below.
t ml
Gcc download from SGI
http://reality.sgi.com/ariel/freeware
6.2 & 5.3 Header files & Linker
http://www.interlog.com/~kcozens/sgi/gcc-irix.h
I of course now expect at least a sorry, I was dumping FUD to slashdot giving SGI a bad rap, because I didn't look around.
tsuiter@midusa.net
but what do I know
That's what we're all trying to figure out! Apparently not much guaging from your many tiresome and repetitve posts.
You feel ripped off. Understood. Now go have a snack or something, eh?
**>>BELCH
#!/bin/sh
at the top and then to used
export PATH=$PATH:...
which is a error in "sh" because it's "bash". It's sad when you can't even get past the first 15 lines of code.
Maybe you've not heard of GTK/Javascript ?
--
While I don't exactly like IDEs all that much, much less "a highly graphical interface that eliminates the need for employing older command-line tools." (If I wanted a pretty GUI to keep me away from my computer, I'd use MacOS, damnit. As far as debuggers go, I'm still pretty happy with gdb), since my favorite girl's name is Jessilin, an IDE named "Jessie" seems pretty cool (should have been spelled "Jessi", though, IMO :).
~ Kish
I'm pretty sure that it's being in Java rules it out of the class of RMS "Free Software" as it requires propritatary software to run. (It may be an open standard, but I don't know of any Free JRE)
I'd also think this violates (at least in spirit, if not in practice) the OSI "Open Source Principles".
It doesn't really matter if it's released under and Open Source licence if it requires closed tools to run.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Damn. Now I have that stupid song stuck in my head.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
All these SGI stories on slashdot lately have been pissing me off. Unless SGI gives out the necessary pieces of the IDO so free software developers can make things for Irix (Linux isn't all there is you know) with gcc, then my thoughts about them don't change. People bitch about Sun but look at SGI, they've made more mistakes regarding their OS than Sun has. Maybe that's why SGI is doing so badly lately. They try to gouge the customer for all they have by removing essentials from the OS and then charging astronomical amounts to put them back in.
Sorry, this might be flamebait or offtopic, but this is terribly annoying. I just wish SGI would at the very least place the necessary pieces of the IDO on their freeware site. I won't stop complaining until they do, and neither will other SGI hobbyists.
It's a little like comparing VisualC++ to Jessie.
Except VisualC++ is cheaper (for me) than KDevelop.
For commercial development, the Qt libs cost about twice as much as VisualC++ and NT4.0 WS. combined.
Jessie and Java are free for any use.
I don't think Java qualifies as open source, because Sun is retaining the right to modify and distribute.
But the JRE, JDK, Swing, etc. are all free for private or commercial use.
For Linux, go to blackdown.org for Win, Mac or Sun, go to sun.com
damn it I couldn't resist! bad fingers, bad!
I was just going to say that! It was posted last month right?
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
Try not to get worked up about it. This happens _all_the_time_ on slashdot. Sometimes I wonder if the slashdot team has Alzheimer's.
It seems like whenever SGI is mentioned in a forum there's someone (posting mostly as Anonymous Coward) that will jump in to bash SGI for remote-past issues. Please get on with the program: there's no major Unix commercial system vendor that is as open and friendly to Linux and free software as SGI is today. Unlike others who pay lip service to free software and maybe bundling other people's work, SGI is actually actively contributing significant pieces of free software to the world and this includes multiple patches to the Linux kernel. The work continues.
Check out oss.sgi.com for some details.
And finally: why are you bringing up IRIX when SGI has been providing major support for Linux, shipping Linux systems, and when the subject matter (jessie) can run on any system including on SGI competitor systems?
Get on with the program, either don't use jessie and stay out of this discussion, or try jessie, enjoy it and thank SGI for making it in the first place.
Finally good IDE tools for Linux
vim, gdb, and a working make prog are all you really need.
Eric
It says it is written in "Java script", giving developers the broadest cross-platform support available.
Come on.
Really?
You really want to go to this link instead.
--
Hi,
I already posted a feature about this "jessie" (If I'm not mistaken)..
Hetz (Heunique)
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/jessie/ ftp://oss.sgi.com/www/projects/jessie/download/
But then again, I might be off the edge here.
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
Nice name for an IDE, the full name of it is actually called Jessie Camp.
A bit of the license opening material (trimmed):
...the CVS access, I think. The ftp download is the same one that's been there for weeks.
I tried 0.5, but it was pretty miserable on my machine (RH 6, blackdown, 300Mhz, 128 MB). After the second window opened, it grabbed all my ram, and about half my swap. Everything slowed to a crawl, and ps showed dozens of processes. None of my other software does this.
In Jessie's defense, my blackdown java is a few months old, so it could be out of date.
I don't know what it is about Java, but I think everything has to be exactly right; from the app, to the JDK, to the OS, to the machine, or it's just nightmarish.
Heh, I bet if I had something like a quad sparc solaris beast with a couple gig of ram it would just about match gtk on my machine. Hmmmm...
(Just kidding).
I hope all these companies continue supporting Linux, but for now I'm sticking to XFCE, Gtk, CodeCrusader and CodeMedic. Glade is improving rapidly -- I use it for raw guis. All have clean, straightforward licensing. (Like Jessie).
Java, Qt, Gnome and the other "large projects" just aren't elegant enough to impress me yet. They seem to just plop themselves down on my machine and take a big dump. Yech.
Dude. I already had that song stuck in my head.
How can I find a woman like that?
I agree that from the FSF/RMS point of view, you can't call Java free.
But I'll never understand why RMS rubberstamped the Qt "Public Edition", while being virtually silent about the Qt "Proffessional Edition".
If you make money developing under Qt, or prefer not to release your code, you must use the professional version of Qt at $1550 per developer.
Java has no such restrictions, semi-hidden costs, or duplicity of licensing. Java seems like such an incredible deal compared to Qt.
Too bad Java is so buggy and slow on Linux, or I'd be all over it.
Yes - if you keep the source closed. Funny how the Qt and KDE supporters gloss over this little "problem"
Please see http://www.troll.no/pricing.html
Price List Qt/Unit - 1 Dev + 1 yr service/support - $ 1,550 DAldredge
gcc and gdb are good enough for me
A little short or not, since that's the standard debugger from Sun , wouldn't it make sense to add support for jdb in your ide? you can't find 'good' java debuggers on the market today - they all fall short of something (ie. scalability, reliable,...). I know this doesn't leaqve you with much, but least you can do is support something standard. - and not necessarily open source because you shouldn't adopt it because it's open source when it sucks.
But it does bring up an interesting question. Why didn't you simply use ddd as a starting point? DDD is the best damn debugger I've ever encountered and its already GPL'd, portable, well documented, and widely used.
>Funny how the Qt and KDE supporters gloss over this little "problem"
Why do you see the Qt commercial licence as a "problem"?
GPL = no commercial/closed source development
LGPL = anything goes.
The Qt commercial licence offers a middle ground of sorts - if you want it for free, you have to distribute source. If you want to write closed source commercial apps, there is a strong financial incentive not to. This deters the proliferation of $10-40 closed source shareware apps that plague the Windows world. As far as I know, there's nothing to deter people from creating closed source GNOME apps.
IMO, Troll Tech has found a great way to support themselves (through commercial support and licences) while providing the Open Source community with a great toolkit free of charge. If you don't pay, you have to deal with the 'GPL-like' terms of their licence. Where's the problem?
MBA
"Good people drink good beer"
I enjoyed this section more than I thought I would. I'm always interested in info on available IDE's as well as their pros and cons. It was interesting to see how quickly KDevelop is gaining proponents. ./ postings.
Whether or not it's an outstanding product in it's current form, kudos to SGI for contributing to open source, and being savvy enough to have Dean diligently peruse these
Oh and before I forget, the KDevelop boosters didn't seem to notice what seemed to be the most important potential with Jessie: it's "focus on scalability, providing multi-process and multi-thread support for large applications".
We can only gain from this contribution.
Read my sig if you like, but I'll never see yours, thanks to Discussions, Viewing, Disable sigs...
Thanks
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens.
#!/bin/sh
setenv PATH
ORACLE_HOME=/oracle/
export ORACLE_HOME
---
FEH! Mix and match your shell!
Chris
There are several reasons that we didn't just start with DDD.
retrofitting scalability is just as bad. Ask any debugger folks that have added things like thread support and other SMP constructs.
There were several other reasons that have been lost in the mists of time.
-Dean
I've found the nicest (and fastest) java debugger on Linux to be gdb (the latest devel cvs version), used in combination with gcj (and libgcj). gcj has no GUI/AWT support as yet, though. On another note, what about the jvmdi(?) - I remember reading about a "direct" java debugging interface which is built into JDK 1.2 and can be used for writing debuggers, integrated into IDEs, etc.
You can use Kdevelop to develop non-QT applications also. It does a better job of that than does Jessie. For that kind of work you dont have to pay TrollTech a dime. Its only when you use QT libs in your commercial application that you plan to sell is when you will need to pay.
I have to ask since 30 % of these posts seem to be from the same guy so s/he is obviously lurking.. why don't you *cross compile* gcc from another machine?? If for some reason that doesn't work, (i don't see why not) go grab a gcc install tree from someone w/ an irix box && a compiler (ask on the net someone has one ;!) then use that to compile a properly installed one. (I know this is at least simple). You've sat around for 4 months w/out a compiler? Thats insane...
Why do you need to run in -n32 or -64 mode? It seems to me the standard linker should do a standard link. It seems that you only need it for those two modes....??
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Do you have nothing better to do than make it harder for me and thousands of others to read these posts without your ceaseless rants about something that doesn't affect 99% of the people out there? My gosh, do you just sit at your browser with your finger constanly clicking the refresh button or what? At least SGI has gone to the trouble of making something to help people. What have you done? I worry about you being this close to a computer with your amount of displayed maturity. Jeremy
It's not like you could just compile it on an Irix box that you didn't pay the steep free software tax that SGI imposes (for headers/assembler) therefore they had no choice but to use java.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Can you please send me your email address? I have a coupla questions before I wade into this issue too deep. No salesman will call ;-)
-Dean
Comment removed based on user account deletion
These days where seeing a lot of graphical tools to develope for linux (like the one from metrowerks for example this one and the one already present in the community) :(
All these tools are equivalent.
They all use the same compiler: gcc/egcs. What really cares IMHO is the code generation process not the way the source code is written and the makefile handled.
Good news is that chip makers are giving components to the gcc/egcs project (Intel gave many hours to the project and those changes will be incorporated to the 3.0 release of gcc, Motorola gave the egcs project all the needed thing to the support of altivec)
What is needed to improve ggc/egcs and all linux applications is competition on the compiler tools. Has everyone could observe the competition between KDE and GNOME was an overall good thing for the two project and the community in general.
Competition is available on the beowulf/normal intel platfrom (you can buy absoft fortrant that comes whith C and C++ too)
Competition will soon appear on Alpha (thanks compag for this move, apps are getteing from 10%-30% speedups and up to 50% speed ups for fp intensive apps)
Since linux is cross-platform the bad news about this competition is that it's not available on all platform and every platform will have its own optimoise compiler so will still use ggc to compile the kernel
I'de like to see a real cross-platform compiler arrise from the linux world which is as good as commercial products.
none Yet.
/* Begin Quote */ Place the needed pieces on your freeware site and I'll shut the fuck up, because right now I'm just getting going. /* End Quote */
When this happened in IRIX 6.2, SGI made freely available (even without shipping costs) the IRIS Development Foundation (IDF) which is all the headers and libraries and utilities that gcc cant provide (such as an assembler), basically everything except a compiler.
When IRIX 6.5 came out, because the demand for the IDF had been so high, they included it with the base OS again. They didnt realize how many users ran gcc and didnt know that so many people wanted the IDF. Once they found out they were mistaken, instead of giving it away on request, they included it in every copy of the next all platform IRIX release.
I dont mind people complaining about valid points, but it was always there for anyone who bothered to use the search function on SGI's website.
For anyone who currently wants the IDF for 6.2 as they haven't or cant upgrade, while they normally do not ship the IDF out anymore, you may be able to get it from SGI if you ask nicely. Nicely does not include comments like the ones in the previous post.
One more point I would like to make though. If you check the GNU binutils package, specifically under IRIX, there are some required things just not available. What do you do when the open source free product you may want to use just doesnt have the proper capability to function in the enviroment? Nobody can tell me it is SGI or MIPS fault that there is no gas for IRIX.
You nicely answered to an obvious flame ("I'll use emacs because there is a one-line obvious error in a script, that still work on most Linux systems"). Don't be discouraged by the flamers :-) Many happy Jessie testers/users are silent.
Infact it isn't based on Java at all. Both Javascript and Java where independently developed, but both were based around the same base languages (e.g. C, C++).
Avoid SGI. The KDE team cares about free software but taking a look at SGIs attitude about letting hobbyists run gcc on older versions of Irix gives you the idea that maybe SGI is just another greedy bunch of losers.
If you'd point me to the server and path I'd really appreciate it Dean. Thanks in advance.
Well considering it's SGI and in the past they have a way of leaving things out this shouldn't come as a suprise. You probably have to pay $800 to get this functionality, but what do I know.
"*or* you are paid to develop *"
So people who write code under the aspices of the sourceXchange, and if it uses any qt code will have to pay?
Hmm.. It is so damn funny..
I have never seen more complaining in my life.
I just came from the Corel thread, COMPLAIN COMPLAIN COMPLAIN.
SGI Gives away a new IDE.. COMPLAIN COMPLAIN COMPLAIN.
The funny thing is, I don't see people that actually contribute to the compunity complaining.
Dean from SGI seems to be running around answering questions, trying to please you babies.
Just show a bit of grattitude.
Dammit,stop that! Now I'll never be able to sleep tonight.
Disclaimer, I haven't run it yet.
Pros:
+ The gprof analyzer looks really beautiful. Maybe not as powerful as NuMega TrueTime or Rational Quantify, but very promising. But definetly better than reading raw gprof output.
Cons:
- Java. I really don't like Java on Linux. But I will give it another try with this application. Maybe it will be my first usable Java application.
- The data displayer does not look as powerful as in i.e. DDD.
If you're interested in writing debuggers for Java then you might wanna take a look at Java Platform Debugger Architecture (JPDA). This is where JVMDI falls under as well.
JPDA provides the infrastructure needed to build end-user debugger applications. It includes Java Debug Interface (JDI) which allows you to do remote debugging, Java Debug Wire Protocol (JDWP) which defines the protocol used between the debugged process and the debugger application, and Java Virtual Machine Debugger Interface (JVMDI) which lets you hook up to the guts of JVM.
For more info, go to the JPDA Home Page.
"They say it's in Java - I have heard of that before.... here... Oh, they call it JavaScript, that sounds far more impressive!"
I'm not sure why they are calling it an IDE. The web page states:
Implemented largely in Java, Jessie provides the portable and extensible framework that can be expanded into a full IDE. [emphasis mine]
sure, it's implemented in Java, and designed to run on Linux, but my question (not meant to inflame or invite scorn) is, will this thing run on an NT box, and permit development to the dreaded Win32?
Howzbout Mac - ie. will it run under Mac OS (MRJ) and let you write Mac OS programs? (either Classic, Carbon, or Cocoa)?
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
This is clearly flamebait.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
So it's like another SGI product, Irix. Yeah, I agree, SGI isn't good at releasing complete packages. It really is too bad though because SGI had such great potential. Too bad they blew it. They might still have a future if they hadn't tried to rape everyone's wallet.
Your IQ is probably down there with the idiot who decided to break Irix by not allowing gcc to work with it.
hmm... nevermind, even you're not that stupid.
Can one of the numerous AC's please enlighten me as to what particular critical pieces are missing?
I do 99% of my work on Linux and all my Irix development machines come fully loaded, so I haven't stumbled over this problem.
If you give me the information, preferably without it ticking, I will take it up the chain and see what I can do. I aint promising nothin', but I *will* try.
-Dean
They should fix their mistake and apologize.
Why do you think they are embracing Linux? Their machines are cool and when Linux runs natively and the GIMP goes 3D, they could fight the macs in High End Graphics (after getting whalloped by NT). Remember the Titanic!
+&x
Cool! To be honest, I checked out the site pretty quickly when this link was posted and based a lot on the screen shot. You might want to update it and add more to really show what it can do. For those of us still at modem speed downloading everything to test it out can really suck up what little bandwidth we have. I'll send you a features list as soon as I get a chance to review it (probably over the weekend).
-- soldack
Haven't seen anything yet that matches the PB & IB :)
from NeXT... so I think I'll stick to good old VIM
first of I would like to thank the team @ SGI !!!!
ok down to it
jessie is an IDE ? last time I looked it was a very nice debugger and performance tweaking tool!
what needs to be expanded well I write lots of different code and I wonder if you can have MULTIPLE windows of code this is a MUST in any IDE ! why do you think most system Admin open many xterms sure they could just use the console switching but being able to look @ lots of thinks @ once helps
UML ugly I know but how about actually designing software. Shocking I know but few of us have to sit down with a pen with a linux box while in windows the tools are there. I am sure that there is an open source UML tool somewhere but where ? and being in Java would help Jessie.
if its an IDE how about syntax checking and autocompletion.
and how about running a tool to produce documentation there are several javaDoc is good and I know their is an open one for C and C++ how about letting us produce decent documentation (a help browser would be nice could be a HTML help if using 1.2 but then that's one for the team)
these are ideas SO WHATS WRONG ?
lastly thank you to Bill and the team @ SGI who work on linux as aposed to just sell it fund them buy SGI next time I know I will.
Regards
john
a poor student @ bournemouth uni in the UK (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
I think Kdev kicks anything that's out for Linux in the ass if you are developing free software. See http://www.kdevelop.org/
Sorry, that was a mistake. The other poster is right, the license says you can use the free edition and be paid, as long the the developed software is free.
Why is this forgotten by almost every IDE wannbe? This really helps me when I am staring at thousands of lines of code.
It looks pretty but can it match Xemacs? It doesn't look like it. Someone should draw up a list of required features for an IDE and send it to these guys (and all the other IDE makers out there). We need it all!
-- soldack
I haven't looked at Jessie yet, but I'd be surprised if Jessie will be able to read automake's Makefile.am files.
The first outfit that figures out that there's a demand for an IDE that understands autoconf and automake should make a pile of money.
Here's a great stress test for all of these IDEs that have been showing up lately: feed them an automake-generated Makefile :-).
--
Jessie Download
Jessie project page
SGI OSS project page
Enjoy!
I don't see how this post could get marked troll.
A troll is when someone goes "So what's so great about this Linux stuff anyway... it looks like it's all command line stuff". A troll is also when someone says "Why can't you moderators seperate informative posts from bad ones?". For a really good example of a troll examine any of Jon Katz's articles, they are good flamebait as well.
Heunique already posted this article to slashdot a month ago, is it his fault that you guys are not paying attention?
Because other people noticed this too, you might have marked it "repetitive"... but it's post #4 so he was the first to notice it.
That's what my post said if you bothered to read it. It says "Qt" is the part that costs, and the cost is related to Qt.
Fool.
At a quick glance, it looks like the SGI license is pretty close to the GPL. Why don't they just GPL this sucker? Am I missing something here?
The GUI was written with the java swing widgets, so I guess it would work under Windows too. All I really need is a good syntax highlightening tool, something that does perl, C/C++, Java, HTML, tcl/tk, JavaScript, and works the way I like it to. Maybe modify this thing to have these features :-)
Only 'flamers' flame!
I don't think anyone is saying there's a "problem" (as in "Legal Problem") with the license or the cost.
My problem is with posts that say "Use this KDE (whatever) product! -- It's free!"
For a significant population of programmers (closed source/using Qt libs), this is simply untrue. The Qt solution (for any closed source application) is about twice that of the equivalent Microsoft solution, and in all honesty, the MS solution kicks KDE/Qt's butt.
Finally, if we step aside from fact and move into opinion, I think it's a shame that so many people wrote all that free code for Linux, just to have a company like Qt take such a contrary stance.
They have a "right" to do it, and it's "legal", but beyond that it's ugly, IMHO.
I was poking around SGI's OSS page, and saw that they were porting STL to Linux. I haven't done much dev work on Linux, mostly Win stuff, and i was a little surprised to see this. Is this the first such effort, or has someone else already done it too? I'm asking because I've been using STL extensively, and assumed it would have been available on Linux sooner.
Step the fsck away from the keyboard, I guess a kiddy like you gets cranky when he doesn't get his nap.
t ml
Did you even do any looking around before you spouted off? In five minutes I got a website (links below) that has binutils-2.9.1 which includes the required libg++ components and then you can download a compiled copy of gcc. This link came off of Ariel Faigon's website on SGI's employee webserver, so if SGI didn't want you to know about it, it sure the heck wouldn't be there.
I think YOU should fix YOUR mistake and apologize to every person here that you've dumped FUD to.
Hopefully this should put this FUD to bed, it's been going around on slashdot for too long...
tsuiter@midusa.net
precompiled gcc:
http://reality.sgi.com/ariel/freeware/
required header files (binutils):
http://www.interlog.com/~kcozens/sgi/gcc-irix.h
The actual sgi page quotes it as 'Implemented largely in Java,...' which sounds alot closer to the mark.
Just a case of mistaken reporting by someone who doesn't know the difference...
Hey, it's great that SGI is releasing this sort of thing, but they did it weeks ago, and Jessie has already been announced on half a dozen different sites. So far, it's just a front-end to gdb and gprof, and many of those (DDD, KDbg, etc) exist already. If they're right about its being a real framework for a serious IDE (class browser, syntax highlighting, makefile management), then I'll be interested. Anybody working in C/C++ should check out KDevelop, the best IDE for Unix I've seen yet. --JRZ
Kdevelop seems have support for autoconf and automake, and actually generate the correct configure and make.am files for you when you start a project. From what I see, you can then either modify the linked libraries within kdevelop or modify the make.am again within kdevelop. It also generates templates for Xwindows programs using the kde toolkit or qt. Also, it automagically generates help file and documentation for your project. On top of this it seems to have nice built in help files. From what I've seen so far, even as a beta, it's a nice, very slick development environment.
It can generate and import automake and autoconf files.
It's written in Java, but it doesn't support Java development. Oh well, I've never found an IDE I like as much as gvim.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/jessie/