RE: Debugging with JDEE

On Tue, 2006-06-27 at 10:34 -0400, Paul Kinnucan wrote:
> Hi Suraj,
> 
>  
> 
> My day job has grown increasingly demanding over the last couple of
> years and I’ve also been preoccupied with my children’s transition
> from high school to college. This has left me with less time than I
> would like to devote to the JDEE.

Hi Paul,

first of all I would like to thank you for all the work you have been
putting into JDEE which made it possible for me to stay within emacs for
my development work and not change to eclipse (in spite of the fact that
this option is hard to avoid these days with all the nice features it
has)
 
Please don't misunderstand any suggestion I make in the following as a
bad mouthing of all the hard work you have been putting into JDEE over
the years (and keep in mind that English is not my main language).

> Just creating this branch was a time-consuming operation. Now, I’m
> stuck with a main branch that has the new generalized debugger
> interface in a half-finished state with no prospect of finishing it
> any time soon and a maintenance branch that allows me to keep
> releasing but requires double-updating for every change.

I don't really see why you had such big problems. I use SVN (more on
that later) for my own project with some branches living at any point in
time and it worked out very nice most of the time.

The structure that I'd suggest would be to have the TRUNK (or HEAD in
CVS speak) be the place where all constant improvements/bugfixes are
made. Your big rewrite of the debugger interface would reside in it's
own branch, without the need to put the daily improvements there
(because those changes should be more or less independent from your big
rewrite).

When you finally finish the rewrite, your branch will be merged into
TRUNK (HEAD), and effectively buried after that. The TRUNK version is
the one releases are made of.

The same procedure applies to other people (more on that also later) -
Suraj could use a branch to integrate his jde-usages plugin into JDEE
proper.

> I’ve been giving some thought has how to extricate the JDEE from this
> morass and have been considering doing the following:

> * Drop JDEBug from the JDEE.

Can't comment on that, but using a private branch would give you an
infinite amount of time where you could finish it - or not, if you ever
decide to.

> * Include Nascif’s JSWAT interface in the JDEE distribution for those
> JDEE user’s who need a more capable debugger than jdb.
> 
>   I don’t know whether it’s possible but it if is it would be nice to
> provide a JSWAT interface that allows source-level debugging within
> Emacs, i.e., I’m thinking that it might be possible to have JSWAT
> replace JDEbug as the backend for a full-featured source-level
> debugger in Emacs.

Same here - I don't think the problem is only the choice of a debugger
to integrate.

> * Move the JDEE from Sunsite to SourceForge with  JDEE 2.3.5.1
> becoming the new base CVS version of the JDEE.
                        ^^^^
                        SVN, please! It's just the better CVS....

I would like to know how the project would be managed there - would
other people be able to become full blown developers with SVN access,
too? Would it be possible for other people to integrate their work into
the TRUNK, and you would act as a supervisor only for parts of the code?

I think this is the main question that needs to be answered about the
future direction of JDEE. With you being for longer times not able to
devote large chunks of time to JDEE, I think having a crew of other
developers that can help out with features, bugfixes and enhancements
could dramatically speed up the development (at least compared to the
current situation). Nowadays the project just depends too much on you
personally doing all the work to be able to move on when anything
prohibits your time being spend on it.  

If this is an option for you, I would really really love to see JDEE
being moved to sourceforge.

> I would be interested in your feedback on this plan as well as that
> of   Nascif, Jens, and other JDEE users.

Regarding the choice of CVS vs. SVN, I really think using SVN is a
no-brainer. After all, the developers of CVS created it to be the
successor, and really tried to ease the pain of learning a new VC system
by using familiar concepts to CVS whenever possible. Branching and
merging is just so much easier, that I never ever looked back after
switching my project from CVS to SVN on sourceforge.

I hope my comments are of some value for the discussion.

Yours sincerely,

	jtl