[Geany] relative paths in project files: is there an option?

[Matthew Brush]

On 06/30/11 03:00, Stephan Beal wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 11:40 AM, Lex Trotman <elextr at gmail.com
> <mailto:elextr at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     I'm sure you had a very embarrassing interview with someone about why
>     you broke the production server and are very annoyed with yourself,
>
>
> i didn't actually - the marketing people who complained got the generic
> technical explanation that a software bug caused it.

The good old PEBKAC bug :)

>
>     especially as the full file path shows in the title bar ('aint I a
>
> Nobody who works with a document-editing tool reads the titlebar on a
> regular basis.

Nobody?

>
>     As Matthew pointed out there is a use-case (and a common one from past
>     user input) where project files don't go in the tree, they live in the
>     users ~/projects. In this case the sources are probably not under your
>     project file so relative is irrelevant, its back to absolute.
>
>
> And i believe that such a use-case lies in the realm of
> gnome-text-editor instead of an IDE. IDEs are (traditionally) designed
> to manage specific source-based projects, not OS-wide collections of
> arbitrary trees.

The way I store the project files has nothing to do with OS-wide 
collections of arbitrary trees or realms of wrongly named editors, it 
has to do with not storing my project/session data in a public source 
tree where other coders have no interest in it. Why does the guy on the 
other side of the world who uses VIM or Emacs care what build commands I 
use in Geany?  And what would the Debian packager making a package of 
the source tree care what indentation settings one of the many 
developers uses?  Would the project's core developers want a changeset 
which includes noise from changing project files?  What about Joe Random 
User scanning the source tree, would he get confused by all the geany, 
anjuta, vim, emacs, eclipse, etc files littering the source tree root?

>
>     Its actually we big system people who tend to have the need to keep
>     project data in the vcs, and who have the control over the projects to
>     be able to do it.  Can you imagine approaching Linus asking to put a
>     Geany project file in the Linux vcs? or any GNU project? or ...  so in
>     all these cases the project file is user local outside the tree.
>
>
> If i was hacking the /usr/src/linux i would drop (or symlink) my .geany
> file into that directory. Problem solved. With the current behaviour, my
> project file will be invalid the next time i upgrade and get
> /usr/src/linux-X.Y.Z+1.

Or you could just have your project file in /usr/src and point to the 
project base directory of /usr/src/linux where the current tree 
will/should always be symlinked to.  I can't even imagine what the 
kernel source tree would look like littered with the probably hundreds 
of different editor/IDE project files that it's thousands of developers 
use between them.

>
> i'm not convinced that having the project file outside the repo provides
> any benefit or any safety against path-related errors. Not only that,
> but it challenges common conventions (unsuccessfully, it turns out).

The benefit is that you don't have it in VCS, so when you checkout the 
code somewhere else, you don't have John Coder's IDE-specific project 
file in the tree pointing to files stored god knows where :)

I can't think of a single project's source tree I've checked out where 
the developers store their personal editor/IDE preferences in the 
project's source tree, at least not that I've noticed.  Still, I don't 
think it would qualify as "common convention", except maybe with 
VisualStudio projects/solutions.

> But hobby-wise going on 30 years - since 25 December, 1983 :). My first
> line of code was something like:
>

I was 1 year old in 1983, but I was already coding in QBasic :)

Cheers,
Matthew Brush