[Geany] Some notes on Geanys project management

[Joerg Desch]

As mentioned in my previous posting, I have spent some time to try 0.13 new
project features. While starting to test, I've found to smaller glitches.

* vcdiff: if the CVS access uses SSH, the passphrase entry is invible. If I
  call geany from the shell, I'm able to enter the passphrase there.

* enforce the extension of the project file. I've edit the filename first,
  and forgot the extension. After this, ".geany" got lost.
  
* opening a project automatically closes all files from outside the
  the project, if the file was loaded previously to the project. After
  closing the project, these file got loaded again.
  
  Now I load the project first, and than the "other file". After closing the
  project, the "other file" is closed too. This is also the case, if Geany
  is closed with the project and the "other file" open. After the new start,
  all files are open. But again, closing the project will close the
  "other file" too!

  Is this a bug?


But now the notes on the project management.

* I need to switch between different projects. It would be
  good to have a sidebar with all projects listed. The project properties
  should have a checkbox to hide a (inactive) project in the sidebar. It
  therefore must be visible in the "open project" dialog.
  
  All files from outside these projects can be automatically added to an
  "virtual" project 'unmanaged'. So the user can fast toggle between a
  project and the "other" files.
  
* The tabs with the opened files and the "documents" sidebar allways shows
  the loaded files of the current project. To make access even easier, the
  "documents" sidebar could hold all of todays used projects as special entries
  (i.e. as bold text). Maybe this highlighting could be used for the
  "projects" sidebar to.
  
* The "projects sidebar" or the main toolbar should have a "drop down" box
  with a list of "release flavours". The list can be fix or may be part of
  the project properties. The handling of these "flavours" is done in the
  makefile. To make the change of a flavour visible, Geany should remove
  a flag file in the project director. This file should be defined in the
  project properties. As default .build-stamp can be used. Without this file,
  a "make clean & make" is performed (by the makefile) to force a rebuild.
 
  The only thing Geany has to do: (1) if the project properties defines a 
  "stamp file", this file must be removed when switching the "flavour".
  (2) The project properties must be extended to hold configurable list of
  "flavour" stings. (3) The selected  flavour must available as macro for
  the make command (of the project). So it will be passed to make, which
  will do all the work. This means there is no makefile generator.

  I personally use the flavours "DEBUG", "BETA" and "FINAL". I pass them as
  variable RELEASE to make (i.e. make RELEASE=DEBUG). This is handled inside
  the Makefile.
  
* one last thing for now ;-)  My old Laptop has a screen resolution of
  1024x768. It would be great to have icons instead of text as lables for
  the tabs of the sidebar.