GUI for bazaar-ng

[John A Meinel]

Martin Pool wrote:
> On  8 Jul 2005, John A Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> wrote:
>
>>Hey everyone, I thought I would start a thread to get some ideas of what
>>people would like in a GUI for bzr. What other gui's they have liked,
>>what are the specific features, and how does that apply to something
>>like bzr.
>
>
> I'd like to get emacs and vim plugins to a better state; for some users
> that's more useful than a GUI.

I can't say that I really use Emacs, and I don't really use vim plugins
either. I am a vim junky, but I just use it as a really good editor, not
as an OS. :)

>
> There seem to be two main dimensions: history, and working copies.  I
> think some GUIs fail by being too strongly oriented towards one or the
> other; for example many CVS viewers are tightly oriented towards the
> working copy but often the history is more in need of a graphical
> display.

I would agree that history can benefit from spatial context. But new
users usually find a gui a little bit easier to use, especially people
from win32 land.

>
> Operations on the working copy include diffing against history or
> against another branch or some point in time; committing; etc.
>
> History can be shown as some kind of branching graph.  One might want to
> see only the history touching a particular file; or to show the section
> of history since two branches or two files diverged.

The question is how to find different branches to compare against. How
to represent them, etc.
I'm thinking to just keep a list of recently connected branches
(possibly one in ~/.bzr.conf/x-gui, and one in .bzr/x-gui), and then you
can bring up that list.

>
> It would be nice if there were a quick way to search the history for the
> last commit containing a string.
>

That would be very nice. Though I think we could make it part of bzrlib,
and not just a gui thing. I will work on this. Probably I'll provide a
plugin later today.

>
>>Have people used Octopy, Liked/Disliked it? (I used it a little bit a
>>while ago, but it wasn't very stable to get a good feel for it's workflow)
>
>
> I used it only a little.
>
> I think a useful thing for the GUI to do is illuminate the underlying
> model of the system; that is to say we hope that GUIs will be more
> learnable than command lines tools but it seems many vc guis are not.
> Rather than assume you already understand the command line tools.
>

So what things do you consider fundamental to the model of the system,
versus what is just implementation details?

>
>>I think it would be pretty easy to do something in wxPython, but that is
>>just my preferred gui toolkit.
>
>
> Whatever we choose I'd hope it was something available for all
> platforms; which seems to mean wxPython or gtkpython.
>

 From what I've read, gtkpython looks poor on Win32, and on Mac it has
to run through X11 rather than being native. (one of my original
decisions to go with wxPython). If that has changed, please let me know.
The other alternative is Tcl/Tk, since it is built into python core, but
as I understand, it looks even worse *everywhere*.

John
=:->
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