ide for gstreamer development on linux

[Sean McNamara]

On Mon, Dec 26, 2011 at 7:36 AM, mateen maldar <mateen.maldar at gmail.com> wrote:
> HI All,
>
> i'm a newbie in gstreamer, just started this week. Wanted to know which is
> the best ide for gstreamer development and debuuging the plugins of
> gstreamer.

Depends on what language you're writing in, mainly. If you're after
very good (and fast) code completion, you'll probably have to go with
an IDE that focuses on the language you're writing in. I've found that
most code completion only works extremely well for one language per
IDE; not sure why that is, but probably something to do with the core
developers' biases, heh.

Keep in mind the traditional argument of "there is no such thing as
'best'" applies here: when it comes right down to it, you're looking
for specific features in the IDE, and if they aren't there, you won't
consider it "best". So everyone's opinion differs.

I would make a case for Anjuta being possibly the best IDE for any
program or library written using GLib/GObject (and GStreamer programs
necessarily are included in that), but I'm sure someone else
disagrees. Here's why *I* like Anjuta, but not everyone will find
these features valuable (or might find some other feature in a
different IDE to be even more valuable).... so just take this as one
guy's opinion:

* Supports most, if not all of the languages that have bindings for
the GNOME platform.
* Saves you hours of work by automatically creating configure.ac and
Makefile.am for you, and updates them organically as you grow your
program, tracking dependencies, targets, and data. This is
extraordinarily useful: you almost have to use autotools if you're
going to link against the GNOME platform, because autotools will tell
you where your dependencies are, and where to install your program.
And since the rest of GNOME uses it, you pretty much have to use it,
too. If you're just writing one Python script, you could write some
hand-made install script that bypasses configure for use on platforms
that don't support autotools well (e.g. Windows). I would advise to
use autotools whenever you can, though.
* Just to underscore the previous bullet: You can have Anjuta generate
perfectly-good autotools infrastructure for you without knowing a
thing about autotools. Autotools takes hours and hours to fully learn
and master if you're writing the files by hand. To me this just isn't
worth the investment in time, especially when Anjuta exists and works
so well. And to forego autotools is just begging to run into path
discovery problems with your hand-rolled scripts (e.g. installing your
binaries in the wrong place, or looking in the wrong directories for
the headers or libs for your dependencies).
* Supports emacs and vi modelines, so you don't have to click around
in settings to find the IDE options to make your edits consistent with
the rest of the file you're editing.

Those are the most important features *for me*, though I suppose Vala
support helps too. My advice is, instead of thinking about what
someone else thinks is best, just try a bunch of IDEs until you find
one that works well for you. It's easy to find lists of IDEs, so go
try them; many/most of them are free/open source so you don't even
have to sign up to some website to download it. Look in your favorite
Linux distro's package manager for starters.

HTH,

Sean

>
> Regards,
> Mateen Maldar
>
>
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