RFC: TortoiseBzr strategies

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Ville M. Vainio wrote:
| On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 3:13 AM, Talden <talden at gmail.com> wrote:
|
|>  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).

I completely agree except for one (important) point.

You have to use a command line to type "bzr qdiff", while you can just browse
there in explorer for Tortoise.

And that is a *key* difference for a lot of people (such as my wife). She knows
how to use Explorer, and icon overlays for the current status makes sense to
her. She *can* use the command line, but she is not terribly comfortable there.
Her typing is slow enough that visually searching and double clicking are faster
for her.

I personally use the command line 99% of the time. I only bring up a GUI when I
want gannotate or (g)vimdiff. (Viz is flashy, but I don't find it displays
anything really useful to me.)

|
|>  The real issue for me (and I suspect others trying to get acceptance
|>  in their teams) is that I have zero chance of getting Bazaar approved
|>  without either IDE or shell integration - 'Management' see shell
|>  integration as a poor-mans alternative to, yet acceptable, IDE
|>  integration.
|
| Still, there is the option of trivial shell integration that can be
| done with a couple of registry keys. If we have 'bzr' menu in explorer
| that has commands to launch "bzr qcommit", "bzr qlog" and "bzr qdiff"
| (from qbzr) on file/folder, the managers and basic users will think of
| it as shell integration (albeit of the kind that won't
| crash/bloat/slow down the explorer - for example, my exprorer.exe
| stopped crashing randomly after I uninstalled tortoiseSVN, inspired my
| Mark Hammond's original post that exposed all the dirty details about
| what is going on behind the scenes ;-).

True, except having the icons really does make it easier for people to use.
Right-click => status is okay, but it is a couple steps removed from just
*looking* at the files.

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

Again, being able to actually see what changes have been committed or not from
just the normal list of files that you are used to seeing is a surprisingly
large benefit. I know it was something I missed back-in-the-day going away from
Visual Studio's Visual Source Safe integration => CVS. (The only other thing I
know I missed was that it was easier to mix sub-projects in VSS versus CVS, for
everything else I feel I came out ahead.)

John
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