Bazaar Explorer prototype showing suggested Bazaar menu for IDEs

[Russel Winder]

Ian,

On Wed, 2009-06-03 at 11:23 +1000, Ian Clatworthy wrote:
> Russel Winder wrote:
> > Moral:  It would be wise for there to be one.  Clearly on M$ Windows
> > this is TortoiseBzr.  Should there be just one for Ubuntu, Debian,
> > Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, SuSE, Solaris, etc.  And then there is Mac OS X
> Hi Russel,
> 
> Are many people using Olive? It doesn't seem to have received much love
> recently?

I gave up using Olive-GTK because there are clear usability problems,
but no-one was tackling them, and I didn't have the time to wade into it
myself.

I am of the firm opinion (backed by anecdotal evidence only though) that
a GUI interface is necessary for there to be any widespread take up of a
technology.  Also, sadly, there has to be a Windows GUI for there to be
any take up at all.

As everyone here already knows, Subversion is widely used primarily
because of TortoiseSVN.  Secondarily there are the Eclipse, IntelliJ
IDEA, NetBeans supports for Subversion.  Thirdly there is RapidSVN.
Even though I and many prefer command line use, most people nowadays
require to use a GUI or they do not use at all.

> FWIW, my primary interest is having a consistent, fully-featured,
> top-level GUI interface. That interface can and should be implemented in
> each native shell and IDE. We also need a stand alone, cross-platform
> GUI tool, which ideally works much the same way. I think that tool needs
> to be lighter than running a full-blown IDE while being less
> directory-tree centric than a shell.

Excellent -- it is not just me saying this now :-)

> To start with, I threw one together in Qt because my immediate interest
> is extending qbzr-eclipse. I could have started from Olive and used its
> toolkit (py-gtk?) instead, assuming Olive users would be happy to see it
> evolve along the lines I prototyped. I have no strong opinions on Qt vs
> GTK at this stage. (My focus is getting the right UI design and being
> able to switch profiles to test out the various applets we've built over
> the years.)

Given that Qt is the basis for the TortoiseBzr implementation, it is
clearly the toolkit of most importance.  If this can be used to give a
harmonized (both along the Bazaar axis, i.e. as much commonality as
possible for Bazaar use, but also on a per IDE basis, i.e. use a GUI
style consistent with that of the IDE) then there is no need for GTK.

There is 20+years of research on usability out there, it would be wise
to investigate it.  There is a lot of material on usability of IDEs as
well as computer systems more widely.  Moreover there is a lot of
material on psychological issues of programming as well as computer use
more widely.  Importantly the two are very different.  The way in which
programmers and software developers work is significantly different from
the way others work.  Self-reflection is useful for one audience but
clearly not for the other.

I would bet (but I have no data) that the vast majority of Subversion
use is actually by non-programmers. 

During the early 1980s, the human--computer interaction community came
up with many tools and techniques for task and scenario analysis.  I bet
they have been improved significantly over the last 15 years.  (I have
been out of academia for 10 years and have rather lost touch.)  Echoes
of the work are seen in the emphasis on scenarios and use cases in
software development methods these days.

Can I suggest that building user models is an appropriate start point
for all this rather than focusing on Bazaar facilities?

Bazaar documentation has a history of being user process focused,
witness all the emphasis on adaptability and workflow models, so I am
confident the idea of building user models for driving GUI design will
not fall on deaf ears.

> My other motivation here is entirely self-interest: I'm trying to go
> command line "cold turkey" w.r.t. Bazaar and to see how far I can get.
> Right now, I can't do that with our current offerings (bzr-eclipse &
> Olive) - they just don't go close to covering the tasks I perform on the
> command line. OTOH, I think I *can* drop using the command line with an
> enhanced qbzr-eclipse and another weekend of development on Bazaar Explorer.

My single biggest problem in switching from Subversion to Bazaar is that
the GUI tools for Bazaar are nowhere near as good as those of
Subversion, and especially on Windows -- I wish I could get rid of that
as well but I cannot.  My colleagues are not prepared to use the command
line, they insist on GUI tools.  Generally this means TortoiseSVN,
though I am slowly weaning them over to Ubuntu -- however, this means
RapidSVN which is dreadful in comparison.

So any and all work on creating a non-IDE GUI for Bazaar has my full
support.

It seems that this means "goodbye Olive-GTK, hello Bazaar Explorer".
Does this imply that diverting effort from bzr-gtk to qbzr would be an
appropriate management decision?
-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      Partner
                                            xmpp: russel at russel.org.uk
Concertant LLP        t: +44 20 7585 2200, +44 20 7193 9203
41 Buckmaster Road,   f: +44 8700 516 084   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
London SW11 1EN, UK   m: +44 7770 465 077   skype: russel_winder
-------------- 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/20090603/379cc497/attachment.pgp