Re: [anjuta-devel] Git shell merged to master

[James Liggett <jrliggett cox net>]

Hi Seb,
On Sat, 2010-11-27 at 12:30 +0100, Sébastien Granjoux wrote: 
> The new design is interesting but I think it needs some improvements. By 
> example, the git tasks window can be automatically displayed if the git 
> window is selected. I'm not sure it's useful to keep the commit dialog 
> inside the git window. Perhaps having an option for keeping git in the 
> main menu would be nice too. Anyway, it's only my opinion, I think it 
> needs more discussion.
Having both a menu and the shell would not require us to duplicate a lot
of things, but it probably would confuse the users because there would
be more than one place they'd have to look in to find the command they
need. I'd rather we had just one interface. 

Git is such a complex beast that one simple menu structure isn't really
suited to all of the things I'd like to have in the plugin. All of the
arguments (err, discussions) we've had over the past year or so have
really shown that IMO.  
> > Unfortunately I don't have a lot of hacking time, so development has
> > gone pretty slow. At a minimum, it should at least build, and the basic
> > features, like committing and simple log viewing, should work.
>
> That's a pity. Anyway, the most annoying issue for me, is that the git 
> window takes perhaps 30s to display the first time and each time I click 
> on the commit button. I don't know why but I can live with this.
I don't see that here, but you're not the first to say something like
this. I suspect it could be the log viewer slowing you down. (It
refreshes itself now.) 

As for having the "dialogs" in the Git window. I did this so that each
of the panes could use one another as a means of browsing the repository
and data entry. If you play around with it enough, you'll notice that
branches, tags, and log entries are draggable. It's like that so that
you can select any revision in any dialog that needs one by dragging
from one of the panes in the middle to the dialog(s) at the bottom.
While this might seem like an unorthodox used of DnD at first, I found
that it does seem to make things a lot cleaner, i.e. you only need to
look in one place to find any type of revision that you might need. 

Please do keep in mind that Git Shell is very far from finished. There's
still a lot of finishing things and refinement to do. I still consider
it to be a somewhat early prototype. I suspect lots of things will need
tweaking before I get it to a state that we can all live with.

I was hoping to do a lot of work over the long Thanksgiving holiday we
have here in the U.S., but I'm hampered by a bug that's preventing
Anjuta from even starting here. See
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635901 So that has pretty
much stopped me in my tracks for now. :(

The good news, though, is that I have finals next week, so after Friday
I'll be free for more than a month and hopefully I'll get something
done.

Thanks,
James