[Geany-devel] Intro (and apology)

[Tony Rick]

Hi.  I'm Tony Rick, and I hit the wrong list for requesting the 'help' 
response the first time.

I'm in Portland Oregon, where a lot of programmers like me are 'at 
liberty' and looking for things to do.  I'm currently helping teach a 
Beginning C Programming class at a local computer hardware recycling 
non-profit organization, FreeGeek.  (Maybe you've heard of it, 
http://www.freegeek.org  if not).  The class is using Geany v0.14 on 
Debian Lenny, which will update to 0.17 with a backports repository 
enabled.  One of the questions that came up in class was about the GPL 
license in the header being a visual irritant.  I explained briefly 
about editing templates,  but having them updated requires a Geany 
restart in that version. I scanned the mailing list archives and 
features list and template management issues have been raised before.

One of the features requests (2925273, from arquebus), requested a 
templates file selection item in the Tools menu.  I thought I might 
start there.  I haven't figured out yet what the criteria are for 
deciding what should be psrt of the core and what should be a plugin.   
I also discovered that custom templates do not appear automatically when 
saved.  The Documentation indicates that this requires a Geany restart 
also, but the 'Reload Configuration' tool does indeed add them.  I'm not 
sure whether this is a bug (templates and related menus should be 
updated when files are modified, like configuration files), or a 
serendipitous feature that simply 'came along with' Reload 
Configuration,  or should be mentioned in the Templates section of the 
documentation (which it currently does not, IIRC).

My original thought was to use GIO and monitor the templates directory 
for changes, but I saw several posts about problems with GIO and 
detecting remote file changes and the use of the GIO compiler 
conditional, and so assumed that the Reload Configuration method had 
been chosen as an interrim solution, and that GIO file change detection 
was on hold until the remote file issue had been resolved.

- tony