[ANN] Bazaar Explorer 0.3 now available

[Ian Clatworthy]

Russel Winder wrote:
> A few questions:
>
> --  Does Bazaar Explorer replace the nascent QBzr desktop that never
> really got off the ground?
>
>   
I guess that will depend on several factors. I certainly have
pretty strong views on what ought to be in and out of Explorer.
One of those features is the ability of users to switch between
QBzr and bzr-gtk applets. That flexibility *may* reduce the
amount of tight integration possible - a constraint a dedicated
QBzr desktop wouldn't have.

FWIW, I am planning tighter integration (see the roadmap)
inside Explorer by selectively using custom dialogs
in places where it's really valuable. In the short term though,
that would be counter-productive because I'm trying to drive
up the usage of *all* the the QBzr applets by making them a
mouse-click (or two) away inside the Explorer UI. (With the
obvious exceptions like qlog and qannotate, the benefit of typing
"bzr qxxx" instead of "bzr xxx" isn't high for someone already
familiar with the bzr command line. OTOH, inside Explorer,
"bzr qxxx" becomes *faster* and more natural that going
to the command line so the applets get used far more often
in my experience.)

At the end of the day, if the vast majority of users find Explorer
easy to use and productive, then I'm happy either way. Right
now, I can honestly say that Explorer is more productive at
*some* tasks I do than the command line is (for me at least)
but not enough for me to give up the command line fully
just yet.

> --  Will Olive-GTK be replaced by Bazaar Explorer?  On the one hand
> combining what little effort is available into one direction helps
> progress.  On the other hand having two gently competing systems helps
> progress.
>
>   

While it didn't meet mine, I suspect Olive meets many of its users'
needs. OTOH, I'd be excited if the Olive maintainers decided to
adopt some of the ideas in Explorer. At one extreme, it could
become "gexplorer", offering a similar level of functionality but
implemented fully in GTK instead of Qt. I'm not an active
bzr-gtk developer so how Olive evolves from here is not up to
me though.

> --  How does this fit with the work on TortoiseBzr? (If at all?)  I
> haven't heard much on TortoiseBzr recently -- not that this matters to
> me personally as I am Ubuntu, with a bit of Mac OS X and Solaris, but
> the majority of users will almost certainly be Windows users.
>
> --  Is anyone working on integration of Bazaar with Nautilus?  (I am
> guessing there is a similar question to be asked for KDE as well as
> Gnome?)
>   

With a view to consistency, I'd like to see each IDE and file manager
adopt the same "Bazaar" menu as Explorer offers. If they use the
same abstraction layer, each integration also gets the same ability to
switch between QBzr and bzt-gtk applets. The Explorer distribution
now includes metadata defining both the menu to use and the
mapping to qbzr/bzr-gtk commands for precisely this reason.

Ian C.