Suggestions for future releases

[Reiner Suikat]

Hello,

after working for a few days with sourcenav I'm very impressed with it! This
is really a great tool to manage our software project consisting of some
hundreds of files. It only took me a day to get the entire project with all
build targets set up.

However, as with every neat thing, there is room for improvement. Here are
some suggestions for things that I consider extremely useful:

1) Import and export of build targets. I have found no way to exchange build
target definitions between users. Since our project consists of about 20
shared libs and 10 executables it is extremely annoying, if every user has
to set up all targets himself. The only way to copy target definitions at
this time appears to copy the .proj file. Unfortunately this also contains
other things like user specific settings, which one might not want to
overwrite.
I think an import/exprot facility should be fairly easy to add, as writing
project definitions to and from the .proj file is implemented anyway. All it
needs are menu entries to import or export selected (or all) targets to an
external file (in .proj format). Of course, this requires also some
overwrite protection mechanism.

2) Meta or super targets. With this I mean targets that define a set of
other targets to be build. As said before, we have about 30 targets in our
project, so rebuilding the whole thing requires 30 separate builds. With a
super target one could do this in one step. Obviously it would be neat if
one could define different such super targets, like build all shared libs in
the project.

3) Projectwide Defines/Compiler flags/Include paths. This would allow to
change defines for the entire project easily. Such changes would be useful
when moving the software to another machine or architecture. As a workaround
it is of course possible to use environment variables, but that is less
elegant.

4) A version control view of the entire project. Sourcenav's version control
support is great for single files, there is nothing missing here. But there
is no support for the project as a whole, like a list of files that are
modified locally or that need to be updated from the repository. This would
be a great addition also. (Of course, one could use standalone version
control software for that, but that means working with two different tools
rather than one integrated tool.)

These are my suggestions for things I consider useful or missing in
sourcenav. Again, I am very impressed with sourcenav! I would like to see
other peoples opinions on these and especially of course, if any of these
are already in the works ...

Greetings

Reiner
--
Reiner Suikat
Institute of Flight Guidance
German Aerospace Center (DLR)
reiner.suikat@dlr.de