RFC: TortoiseBzr strategies

[Talden]

>  >  I'd say my use is split 80/20 in favour of the commandline - sometimes
>  >  it's easier and quicker to just click through some of the easy
>  >  right-click behaviours one after another than it is to script
>  >  something or use the commandline directly.  Despite this I could
>
>  Yeah, but the existing GUI's already solve 95% of what shell
>  integration provides. Explorer overlays are just a glorified version
>  of "bzr qdiff" or "bzr status", and I'm hesitant to even call it
>  "glorified", since for many purposes it's inferior (you can't see the
>  status of the whole tree at a glance).

A lot of this is perception - To some degree I'm talking about
political blockers to adoption as much as anything else.

>  >  Though I don't expect to see strong IDE integration before the point
>  >  in time at which I need to have selected and implemented an approved
>  >  tool, I am hopeful to see enough progress on TortoiseBZR to get some
>  >  leniency from 'Management' in selecting Bazaar.
>
>  I don't see why the similar kind of "trivial" integration could not be
>  done for eclipse as well. We don't need to provide native eclipse
>  GUI's for anything, just launch the same "bzr qdiff" & "bzr qlog"
>  commands from eclipse team menu.

Since most of the team use Intellij IDEA this would simply be another
heavy-weight tool just to use bzr (and they'd have to have appropriate
Eclipse projects created - though the latest IDEA helps here).

Another issue is that the other GUIs I've played with for bzr were
non-obvious to install and not familiar 'windows look & feel'
applications, making them less obvious in their usage.

Familiarity does have value for team members who want to be able to
use a tool quickly, not climb a mountain having to learn a completely
different way of working.  Having simple right-clicks for update,
commit-here, status-here, diff, log is an improvement when the
navigation is in a tool they're familiar with.  Absolutely, just like
TortoiseSVN you're going to want to be able to show full working-tree
status and history browsing... If these are simply shortcuts to
launching into other bzr GUI solutions that is probably fine.

>  "Do the simplest thing that could possibly work" and all that.

An excellent place to start...

--
Talden