What the GDE is not

The GDE works on an amazingly wide variety of highly dissimilar platforms. This means it is likely to work on whatever platform you might have available, and it means it likely works on whatever platform you may wind up working on. This is a direct consequence of its history. The GDE tools began on a DEC Vax nearly 20 years ago. However, all the world is not a Vax; all the world is not a Sun; and Linux is a Johnny-come-lately. Many people in many places have been working out problems on many platforms for many years. The result is a robust collection of tools that could never have been developed by any one manufacturer and that provide a fairly uniform development environment for all these dissimilar platforms.

The net result is that we do not have an IDE (Integrated Development Environment). What we do have is a Non-Integrated Development Environment that works similarly across this variety of platforms yielding an integrated development experience. And, we have tools that release on their own schedules, which can sometimes cause problems. They do, generally, work together, but their separateness is both a strength and weakness. It is not always seamless. Interdependency is reduced, reducing overall complexity and schedule/release issues.

Not to say they don't play together, however. They build on each other and often do include cooperation hooks. Not always, though. Some Linux distributions supply a packaging layer that superimposes some interdependency checks. This vastly simplifies package upgrades.

Now that you know how widely usable the GDE is, this is a warning that we will not be dealing with portability issues. The tools do not mask over everything and the focus of this book is the tools, not cross platform portability. Our primary example platform will be Linux, but very little will be said that is not directly relevant to using GDE on other platforms.