[Gnu-arch-users] tla front-ends

[David Allouche]

On Sun, 2004-10-10 at 15:18 -0500, John Meinel wrote:
> Well, I would like to switch to fai, but for some reason it doesn't seem 
> to run under cygwin. I had a little bit of trouble with symlinks, though 
> I thought I fixed that.

It would help if you could be more specific about the problems of fai on
cygwin. These are probably actual problems in PyArch. Though cygwin
compatibility is not a priority for me (I have no Windows environment to
run the tests, and I do not intend to have one) I will gladly help
figure out the problem and accept fixes.

> I know I have friends who would really like to see more GUI front-ends. 
> (Something like WinCVS, TortoiseCVS, or Cervisia, where you have a path 
> browser, and it will tell you the current state of the files, give you 
> diffs/history, etc.). The closest one I know if is Octopy, but I'm 
> guessing that hasn't really been maintained.

Indeed, the maintainer seems inactive.

> Since it is also a python app, it would probably be nice if it was 
> modified to use the nice python wrapper instead of it's own. That way if 
> tla is ever librified, octopy would get it for free as well. And there 
> would be less redundant code.

I intended to port octopy to PyArch initially. The desire to write a gtk
equivalent to octopy was part of the original motivation behind PyArch.

I plan to put a release out as soon as possible (it will probably take a
few more months at the current pace). After that, I will welcome
improvements needed for such a project.

> I would be interested in writing a wxPython gui interface, but I have to 
> actually finish my dissertation, so there is not much of a chance for 
> the next few months.

Sounds like a good timing, then :)

> Are there other front-ends that people use? I know there is quite a few 
> tla-contrib scripts, but that's not really a front end, just a 
> collection of helpful things.

I personally use tlash, which is a horrible hack. Eventually I should
start working or Rob Weir's raw (Reusable Arch Wrapper).

> I guess there is xtla, though I think of it as an emacs plugin, not a 
> front end. Simply because I don't know emacs (I'm a vim user), and I 
> don't know what kind of benefit vs time to learn emacs just to use xtla.

xtla is a very interesting achievement, however I doubt it could teach
much about the right way to write Arch GUI applications, as it is a very
idiosyncratic emacs application.

In my opinion, Arch GUI design is still a completely open topic.

-- 
                                                            -- ddaa