"Just Works" for Developers

On Sat, 2005-11-12 at 22:17 -0500, Jay Camp wrote:
> Ubuntu is constantly focused on making things easier for the user, but
> what about for the users who are developers (or potential developers)?
> 
> * queue video of Ballmer yelling "developers, developers, developers!" *

A feature I've been dreaming of on this topic is a kind of source
manager, dep resolver, updater for the packages in ubuntu.

Currently I just do cd ~/src && apt-get source pkg && sudo apt-get
build-dep pkg to get some sources to play with.

What would be nice is an IDE integrated way of doing this. Plus that the
apt-get source part would create bzr branch by default. Thus it would be
possible to get the latest version of a package to play with. The
build-dep part would get it's meta data from the sources so that if a
build-dep to the latest version is not an ubuntu package it would point
to the bzr version of that package.

As implied with IDE-integrated the sources wold be registered in a way
so that the IDE of choice would list all sources downloaded in this way
as a project, with no manual intervention.

F.ex.
I want to hack on gedit. I open synaptic and select install source
branch for the gedit package. Then I open an IDE and select the gedit
project which I can immediately begin hacking on. So I change a few
lines and click the run button. The package and possibly it's
dependencies are built.

When satisfied I can select to send a patch to one of the maintainers
listed for that project.

>From the IDE I would also have the possibility to cherry pick patches
associated with the project and merge with various upstream branches.

This can be extended more to really integrate all sub-projects, people
and patches associated with a specific project. But I'll leave it at
this for now.

What do you think? Feasible? Usable?

Regards,
John Nilsson