IDE integration & GUI tool update

[Ian Clatworthy]

Hi all,

In coming days, we're hoping to roll out a new version of qbzr-eclipse,
complete with an enhanced Bazaar menu matching the one available in
Bazaar Explorer. If you're an Eclipse user, we'd appreciate your
feedback on this. (In coming months, we plan to integrate qbzr-eclipse
with bzr-eclipse so there's one really good offering, but we need your
input first on how best to do that.)

After Eclipse, the next most important IDE on my/our hit list is Visual
Studio. I hope to have some good news and a potential roadmap for better
VS integration available soon. Stay tuned.

More broadly, here's the 3-pronged desktop strategy I'd like to see:

1. A simple to use, cross platform GUI tool, which includes the
   reference "Bazaar" menu other desktop tools should provide.

2. IDE integration: Bazaar menu + calls to bzr-xmloutput to deliver
   deeper integration into built-in diff dialogs, etc. Examples are
   integration with Eclipse, VS, WingIDE, NetBeans, IntelliJ, etc.

3. Shell integration: Bazaar menu + icon overlays & status filtering.
   (e.g. show me just the conflicts or unversioned files.) Examples
   are TortoiseBzr and NautilusBzr.

So the goal is consistency: moving from one desktop tool to another
should be relatively easy if we can provide a standard Bazaar menu and,
ideally, standard pop-up (context-sensitive) menus. The secondary goal
is openness, i.e. the user should have a setting controlling which set
of dialogs they want to see - QBzr's, bzt-gtk's, etc.

Many of the pieces are now falling into place. Thanks to a huge amount
of help from Alexander Belchenko last weekend, an early adopters version
of Bazaar Explorer was released on Monday. This contains the proposed
Bazaar menu and it allows switching between QBzr and bzr-gtk. (This
switching ability is really important. Explorer's goal is to help
*unify* our various desktop efforts by building on them and making them
more easily accessible to more users, not to complete with existing
stuff already done.) Some work is also under way to move bzr-xmloutput
into the core so there's one less dependency for IDE add-ons to worry about.

If you're interested in desktop tools for Bazaar, please consider
joining one of the existing teams or mailing lists. These include:

* https://launchpad.net/~bzr-gtk
* https://launchpad.net/~qbzr-dev
* https://launchpad.net/~bzr-ide-integration

If there's interest, I'll set up a bzr-desktop team with a goal of
increasing the co-ordination between the various teams.

If you maintain or would like to see Bazaar integrated with your
favorite IDE or shell, please let me know. I'll be happy to provide you
with an XML file containing the Bazaar menu definition and the "command"
to call for each action. (I hope to land that menu definition into bzr's
trunk, post 2.0 probably. Let's get some feedback first on whether it's
any good or not first. :-)

Ian C.