Bazaar Explorer prototype showing suggested Bazaar menu for IDEs

[Maritza Mendez]

I absolutely agree.  Putting the focus on version management  and not
on file management is the Right Thing to do.  I'm not sure why so many
people seem to want to blur the line.  Education is my guess.

I am now using BE daily on ubuntu and I am eager to see it work on
windows.  I'd like to get one of my non production project teams using
it.  BE may be what I need to convert the last holdouts to use bzr.

Thanks
-M


On 6/7/09, Ian Clatworthy <ian.clatworthy at canonical.com> wrote:
> Maritza Mendez wrote:
>> I was seriously thinking about creating Mono front end.  I was at the
>> sketching stage a couple weeks ago and realizing that I would probably
>> implement only the use cases the least experienced members of my team
>> my team need every day.  You have already gone far, far further.  This
>> is awesome!
>>
>
> Thank-you. We aim to please. :-)
>
>> If I understand your plan, bzr-explorer is a pure front-end for bzr
>> and uses external plugins for everything else.  I think this is smart.
>
> From a user perspective, Bazaar Explorer (BE) is designed to compete
> with tools like WinCVS and RapidSVN. In other words, it's designed to be
> a standalone GUI, one that is easy to learn and use.
>
> There is an important UI difference though in BE vs many other VCS GUI
> clients: I want the focus to be on *version management*, not file
> management. (I can't see much value in implementing a poor version of
> Windows Explorer/OS X Finder/Nautilus/Dolphin/etc. If you want a
> file-centric interface, use your OS file manager and we'll extend it
> with (1) some icon overlays to indicate their state and (2) a Bazaar menu.)
>
> OTOH, if you want a version-control focus, use Bazaar Explorer. It's
> central display for a branch will be the status of that branch and,
> soon, it will provide quick and easy navigation to the interesting
> tasks, e.g. conflicts => resolution thereof; unversioned files => adding
> those files, etc. For a repository, it will be the branches and
> checkouts associated with that repository and easy opening/management of
> them. If you grab the latest copy, you'll see what I mean. It has a
> mockup of the repository view. The working tree view (used for local
> branches and checkouts) will have similar filtering provided with panels
> for All, Conflicts, Unversioned, and Changes.
>
> So each tool with have it's role: file managers will focus on files,
> IDEs will focus on projects, BE will focus on version control. All of
> them will, if I get my way, share the *same* Bazaar menu covering 95% of
> the operations themselves. So switching from one to the other will be
> relatively easy.
>
> From a technical perspective, Bazaar Explorer is a shell that calls out
> to other plugins to do the interesting stuff, bar the core
> display/management. QBzr and bzr-gtk will be the first 2 plugins
> supported but the architecture is completely open. In fact, if you're
> using Bazar over the top of Subversion and want to call out to FishEye
> (say) via a menu option, I want that to be something a power user can
> configure for their team.
>
> It will be interesting to see how well the overall approach hangs
> together. Once nice technical thing about calling out to separate
> subprocesses for each task is that the main GUI won't be blocked or
> lockup if the child dialog does. OTOH, I haven't taught BE to
> auto-magically refresh its display when a child process finishes, so the
> F5 key (shortcut for View/Refesh) gets a workout. Even so, I'm now
> dogfooding BE every day and using it for 75% of my Bazaar work. I feel
> that it's very promising, but I'm rather biased. :-)
>
>>  Keeping vcs separate from file browsing does that nicely.
>>
>> This is so cool!  Thank you!
>>
> I hope others feel the same!
>
> Further more, I hope others are inspired to get in and help where they
> can. Code and patches are nice but bug reports and blueprints are *very*
> welcome too. If you have an idea about how you'd like a particular
> dialog to look, simply mock it up in Qt-Designer or Glade and let us
> know. We can then enhance QBzr and/or bzr-gtk accordingly and BE users
> will benefit.
>
> Good ideas/vision are one thing but it takes a community to turn them
> into reality. The more hands involved, the better the overall result
> will be in my experience.
> See
> http://ianclatworthy.wordpress.com/2007/07/02/it-takes-a-community-to-raise-great-software/.
>
> Ian C.
>

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