Re: [Gnome-devtools] gnome-vcs: the start

[James Turner <jmt dcs ed ac uk>]

Some overall comments, firstly this is really great idea, and your basic
description seems pretty much on the money to me. My experience is with
CVS and Perforce, and hence my immediate question is how you will handle
'batching' i.e add/remove/commit groups in CVS and change-lists in
Perforce. (it sounds as if ClearCase doesn't have this notion) The
'easy' solution of simply *not* batching commands (i.e add = 'add +
commit') is highly undesirable; auotmatic grouping might be possible,
i.e delaying commits for some specifed timeout (eg 5 minutes) and using
this delay to combine sucessive commands. But that raises plenty of
problems of it's own.

The other point is that I've used the 'uniifed VCS interface' built into
both CodeWarrior and VisualStudio and generally there is an appallaing
mismatch betwen the UI presented and the features of the underlying VCS
providers. So rather than trying to provide a common visual
configuration interface, I would suggest using embedded bonobo
widgets/controls (don't know the exact terminology). This means when
wriitng a new VCS provider, not only must you write the interface code,
but also provide implementations of the 'config-widget', and any others.

Of course this means the interface is no longer consistent, but I think
that's a false economy : the CodeWarrior interface proved to me that
trying to squeeze different systems into one UI doesn't work. Of course
there can still be consistent UIs for other parts (if UIs are even
required). Where I worked, I found people used WinCVS to manipulate the
CVS repository, and WinP4 to access the Perforce repository : they hated
doing that, but they hated the 'unified' interfaces in VisualStudio even
more.

Anyway I hope I haven't dampened people's enthusiasm : I've just had a
rather bad experience in this area :-)
[Oh, and personally, I'm never using Perforce ever again if I can help
it]

Good luck
James Turner