GUI for Bazaar (was: Re: Bazaar 1.0 and User Guide plans for this week)

Alexander Belchenko bialix at ukr.net
Tue Nov 13 08:41:42 GMT 2007


Ian Clatworthy пишет:
> We are also looking at how we can assist the fantastic work going on in
> the community w.r.t. GUI apps. Things are rapidly evolving here which is
> great news! If anyone has recently reviewed our various GUI tools and
> has ideas on how they ought to evolve from here, please speak up soon.
> Should we pick one and turn it into a "killer" all singing GUI app? I
> personally like choice so perhaps we need to look at consistency across
> apps (eg. usability guidelines and GUI-friendly APIs) instead? There is
> no right answer here but usability and Just Works are core values of
> what Bazaar is about, so GUI tools are clearly important to us.

In my understanding there is only one "real" choice now: bzr-gtk.

But this means that most of the windows users (well, at least those who 
use standalone bzr.exe) can't use it. At all. Because standalone bzr.exe
lacks [Py]GTK libs.

In my personal opinion GTK-based application looks bad and behaves bad 
on Windows. (It's my own personal IMHO! -- many other people disagree 
with me). So, sorry, but who want to use bzr-gtk should use python-based 
bzr and install GTK libs yourself.

I like QBzr way. How it works, how it behaves, how it looks on Windows.
It actually lacks many features bzr-gtk has. But it's nice GUI plugin.
I like that Lukas did incredible job to provide QBzr version with 
bundled PyQt libs inside and this version is compatible with bzr.exe.
I like this way. Unfortunately QBzr is not actively developed (compared 
to bzr-gtk) and Lukas don't intend to make QBzr "tool for everyone".
I do what I can to improve QBzr because for my taste it's more 
windows-friendly (again, it's my own IMHO), but I'm not familiar with Qt 
(I have more experience with Tkinter and Tile. Tile btw looks very nice 
on Windows and Linux).

I'm also like to see more general way to build GUI for Bazaar: i.e. some 
independent core that allows to use different GUI front-ends, in the 
terms of Model-View-Controller pattern. Current GUI apps/plugins don't 
follow this pattern, instead they all are mess of logic and GUI code.
But to follow MVC means that all internal infrastructure should be 
greatly revisited. It's not worth it now, may be in the long term.

In short term bzr-gtk team could adopt Qbzr's way and start providing 
version with GTK libs inside that will work with bzr.exe. Also something 
should be done with TortoiseBzr project.
That's my opinion about GUI.

BTW, what's news from google summer 2007 students?
Probably I missing their final report.

Alexander



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