[Monotone-devel] [OFFTOPIC] News and Outlook on guitone

[Thomas Keller]

Hi fellow hackers and users!

The work on guitone goes slowly in the same pace as the monotone
development itself. I recently included the possibility to add and drop
attributes over automate in monotone and worked in support for that in
guitone as of yesterday. Also, two other features will popup in 0.7: A
file-based history (something similar to file-restricted mtn log) and
the possibility to find unaccounted renames in a workspace, i.e.
filesystem renames without mtn taking notice (there is no mtn equivalent
command for this yet).

Still, main workspace features like add, drop, rename and update are not
possible with the automation interface in monotone, hence there is no
support for these basic features in a GUI like guitone. I could edit
_MTN/revision myself, of course, but this would be an ugly hack and I'd
have to take care of all the corner cases myself, like adding already
added files, dependent additions (adding foo/bar must add foo/ before),
automatically adding attributes for binary or executable files and all
that. On the other hand I kind of refuse to use mtn directly (without
automate), because I'd have to start another process which works on the
same database / workspace for that each time, which also may conflict
with the running process in the background (given the fact that
hopefully the new automate inventory is finished sometime and makes it
into head, which should enable partial "background" updates of the
currently loaded workspace). And finally, the automation interface is
free of all the localized output junk, well, if you don't mind the
localized error messages there, of course.

Anyways, since I didn't got much feedback or bug reports on guitone
itself, but can clearly see that people download it, I wonder what users
wish that guitone could do it currently doesn't (given the current
functionality available over automate) - if they use it actually or if
they just download it, try it out and then throw it away.
In the current head branch exist two files already which collect some
ideas and todos for new functionalities (under notes/), but these things
mainly come out of my head and do not necessarily reflect what users
want to see.

And of course I'm looking for patches and a little help here and there,
since hacking on this project all alone doesn't make as much fun as it
could if there would be somebody else =)

Thanks for your time and for reading this.

Thomas.


PS: You don't necessarily need to CC monotone-devel on replies, instead
you could either send a reply directly to me or use the mailing list for
guitone for further discussions: address@hidden - there
is a link to the mailman setup on guitone's mainpage. With this initial
post on monotone-devel I simply wanted to target a greater audience.

--
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