[Haskell-cafe] EclipseFP (Haskell IDE) 0.9.1 released

[Thiago Arrais]

Jason,

2006/2/2, dagit at eecs.oregonstate.edu <dagit at eecs.oregonstate.edu>:
> I think it's important to keep this aspect, the ramping up and the integration.
> Particularly, I'm against tools that want to do things their way.

Me too.

Let's focus on some of the problems you found.

> I wanted to use EclipseFP to help with darcs development.

That is indeed a very happy coincidence.

Our main test source was the darcs source code. For instance, the main
change on the last release was the parser rewrite (this leads to very
interesting results, keep with me). One of the requirements we have
imposed on ourselves was to only "officially" release the parser when
it was able to parse all darcs source code (all hs and lhs's).

I think the both teams (EclipseFP and Darcs) would win a lot with a
partnership. FPers could provide Darcsers a high-quality IDE and they,
in return, would provide the very useful feedback from a real-world
project.

> One
> direction would be fine for now, but ultimately I would want it to let me
> change build settings in Eclipse and have it mirrored in the makefile.  Does
> eclipse have a makefile plugin?

CDT (Eclipse's C/C++ IDE) has makefile support. It is able to generate
makefiles and to import already-made ones. I think it is promising to
take a look at that.

> The next problem I encountered was the parser was not forgiving enough to parse
> the darcs source code, as a result everything was colored as a comment.  Every
> file that contained "#include", "#define" or similar threw a lexical error.

This is one of the bugs fixed provided by the new parser, included on
the latest (0.9.1) release. For the time being, it simply ignores
those lines. Maybe we could provide better support on the feature, if
it seams useful.

So, I'd recommend you to try the new release. There should be better
support for this issue by now.

> I also noticed that when you
> click on an error so that eclipse will take you to the place of the error, it
> often took me to lines that were perfectly fine, in fact, I think it was often
> the wrong file.

I can't say this one is solved on the latest version. We'll need a
more detailed test case to fix this one. Would you mind registering a
bug on our tracking system?

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=108233&atid=649852

> After I got that error, I
> stop using eclipse in windows and switched to OSX.

I would say this has to do with the old parser. But that's a too
specific issue to discuss here.

> My advice would be to download the darcs source code and try to use darcs with
> EclipseFP. You'll see first hand some things that could use some fix'n :)  And I
> think I could stand to use eclipse to test out your changes if you need a
> tester, but I doubt I'd have much more time to spare than testing.

We would love to get any kind of help.

> Hopefully my rantings will be helpful to you and not make you lose hope :)  I
> really want see you succeed.

They are actually much helpful. EclipseFP is work in progress, and I
hope it wil always be. This kind of direct feedback from our users is
very much appreciated.

Thank you very much,

Thiago Arrais