In front and behind the scenes of Anjuta development
7. June 2010
(cross-posted from the Anjuta News Blog)
Today Anjuta 2.31.3 was released today and it brings some nice features and bug fixes (see NEWS)
What’s new?
- Massimo Cora’ put a lot of energy into the speed of the symbol database population and brough it down to about 15 seconds for 1000 files.
- Abderrahim Kitouni finished up his GSoc ’08 work and the language support for vala got merged into trunk. This means we now have autocompletion and calltips for Vala.
- Naba Kumar ported the class-inheritance plugin from GnomeCanvas to FooCanvas, made it much faster and integrated it back into master
What’s happening behind the scenes?
- Sébastien Granjoux worked hard on the new project-manager branch but unfortunately it won’t be finished in this cycle. But once it is finished it should bring a much better project management to anjuta.
- Naba Kumar is working on improving the database queries for the symbol-db which should in the end result in faster and better autocompletion and in general better code.
- James Liggett started working on a completely new and innovative interface to the git version control system. It will integrate version control much better into the workflow.
- Abderrahim Kitouni also worked on a plugin loader for python and javascript plugins. In the end we should hopefully support even more plugin languages with gobject-introspection. He blogged about it.
- In general we follow the development of libpeas with much interest. This might replace our own plugin infrastructure in the future.
- The glade plugin was cleaned up. It doesn’t provide any new features (actually, some were even removed) but it should be more stable now. This work is targeted to allow to drag signal handlers from glade right into the code. Currently this mostly meant cleaning glade internals but there is still hope finish it for 3.0.
How you can help!
- Test the latest release and file bugs! Though declared as “unstable” it should be equally stable as 2.30.x.
- Help us fixing bugs! There is lots of stuff to do including a new icon (we would like to keep the horse which was a unicorn before the horn was ripped off, otherwise you are pretty free) and a new splashscreen.
- Help to improve language support! We have language support plugins for C/C++, JavaScript and Vala now but most of the Anjuta developers are C coders. We need people to test this and if possible also fix it. Vala support is written in Vala itself which should make it easier for you.
- Documentation, especially tutorials are another point were you can help us and any potential GNOME contributor in getting started with Anjuta.