bzr-gtk vs. QBzr

[Russel Winder]

Alexander,

On Wed, 2009-02-25 at 21:26 +0200, Alexander Belchenko wrote:
> I know there are many bzr-gtk users here. I guess some of them maybe tried QBzr.
> I know some people have both plugins installed because some features are
> unique to one plugin of two, and vice versa.
> 
> May I ask you to describe your thoughts, informal comparison between bzr-gtk and QBzr.
> I'm one of QBzr developers and I'd like to understand differences better.
> Last release of bzr-gtk was 6 months ago, although it's still in more-or-less
> active development. I guess bzr-gtk is stable and mature tool then.

Some purely off-the-cuff and personal remarks to give some feedback, but
you may not like them :-)

I am using Ubuntu.

QBzr has no "console" and so I just don't use it -- if I using the
command line I use the command line, I don't use the command line to
start GUI tools, I expect to use a GUI front end for that.  bzr-gtk is
almost as bad as Olive-GTK doesn't have some basic commands like "create
a file" so cannot be used as an interation interface.  I haven't tried
Nautilus as a bzr front end.  

"bzr qlog <shared repository directory>" is a singualr exception, I
definitely use it to show what is happening with multiple branches in a
shared repository, bzr-gtk has no equivalent as far as I know.
Unfortunately this only does 0.5 the job that "gitk --all" does.  Gitk
wins here on all counts, but mostly because it shows the remote branches
as well as the local branches.  This is perhaps the single biggest
irritation of my life, I want to use Bazaar to manage my Subversion
repository but Git has all the speed and remote branch visualization and
management features.

I use Gnome so bzr-gtk is effectively prefered and it obeys my (rather
idiosyncratic) theme.  QBZR doesn't and is irritating exactly because it
doesn't -- but then why should it it is Qt not GTK!  Even then it is
still irritating -- but I guess that is my problem.

So to be honest I occasionally use bzr viz, I use bzr qlog a lot but
otherwise I don't use any of the GUI tools.

> This poll was inspired by Marius Kruger's thoughts on things that should be fixed in bzr,
> available on his wikipage. In particular he wrote following about GUI tools:
> 
> """proper gui tools for windows people
> 
> Currently we have tortoiseBzr, but when I actually saw it on window, I was quite disappointed. It
> uses qbzr which is far behind gtk-bzr. I don't know why they swithed. One of the main missing things
> is the lack of a single gui tool which can do everything like olive. Even the stuff you can do by
> rightclicking on folders in tortoiseBzr, is quite limiting. This forces users to the commandline
> which is not acceptable for some.
> """

Despite the fact that I think Windows is anathema, it has to be said
that it is the primary OS in use.  TortoiseBZr is therefore the
interface most people will use.  Bazaar therefore stand or falls by
whether Windows users like and can use TortoiseBzr.

I suspect that non-programmers will be the main audience even though
historically Bazaar has been aimed at programmers.  Experience shows
that TortoiseSvn works and does the job.  If TortoiseBzr isn't at least
as good and usable Svn will be used in preference to Bazaar not because
of CVCS vs DVCS issues but simply because the GUI is better.

I will now run for shelter ;-)


-- 
Russel.
====================================================
Dr Russel Winder                 Partner

Concertant LLP                   t: +44 20 7585 2200, +44 20 7193 9203
41 Buckmaster Road,              f: +44 8700 516 084
London SW11 1EN, UK.             m: +44 7770 465 077
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/attachments/20090225/ee8edf12/attachment.pgp