Suggestions for development environment improvements

From an irc chat (office hours) on April 14, 2004.

• Improve chandler's startup time, including startup time with a fresh repository
  • http://wiki.osafoundation.org/twiki/bin/view/Jungle/ChandlerPerformance

• Parcel loading
  • separate chandler backbone parcels from other parcels, and allow these other parcels to be loaded from a menu, without bringing down all of chandler
  • allow reloading of parcels
  • syntax checking to find a set of errors, add xml validation
  • Robustness: Bad parcels should not prevent Chandler from starting, and should not cause Chandler to crash.

• Wing
  • Get log files and wing to work well together (windows problem only)
  • If we have some syntax checking (or other command line tools), make them available from wing (menu)
  • To be clear, we are assuming that some folks have emacs/command line type environments and other folks are using wing, we need to support both styles of development.

• Debugging from the GUI
  • add pycrust
  • add a command line interpreter setup with chandler environment
  • add a blocks inspector (like DOM inspector)

• Cross platform development
  • don't build everything, use the prebuilt binaries
  • you should label the source tree when you generate prebuilds, then people can grab matching source from CVS

• Documentation
  • CPIA documentation will be necessary, we're still in flux so it doesn't exist yet
    • There is some good documentation, for example the autogenerated blocks documentation. The problem with the blocks documentation is that it stops short of documenting attributes - you don't know what values to use. Overall, more explanation because even descriptive names (alone) are not enough.
  • TipsForDevelopingChandlerCode20040414^?
  • http://www.osafoundation.org/docs/current/model/
  • http://www.osafoundation.org/docs/current/model/parcels/OSAF/framework/blocks/Kinds.html
  • http://o11n.org/docs/0.3/

• Donn Denman's comments about writing parcels:
  • http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/dev/2004-April/001374.html

-- KatieCappsParlante - 14 Apr 2004