Russel Winder wrote:
No problem. It is invariably more important to get stuff out for people to tinker with than to try and get something right before issuing it. Even if some comments are about the wrong stuff, getting the comments flowing creates the energy that fosters real progress. I think Bazaar/Mercurial/Git are bad analogues since they are VCSs and the use cases have very different aims. The real analogues are SCons, Waf, etc. I don't think any of these are anything other than commandline. I don't know of GUIs for these but there is an Eclipse plugin for SCons I think. The question is what benefit does a GUI bring over command line. On Windows this is probably more of an issue as the concept of command line seems to be anathema -- though I see PowerShell is making moves towards popularity. Having said this I think Windows in anathema an use only Ubuntu, Mac OS X and Solaris ;-)
I think that there are a lot of cases where having a GUI can be an advantage, particularly when there is a lot of information involved.
We are working on a very big build and sometimes I find it easier to see a tree based view of my projects and tasks than to always type them on the command line. "gradle -t" currently outputs 2,488 lines for our system. I find it much easier to use a GUI tree of projects and tasks to find anything uncommon than to try to try to find the right task via the command line.
I also find it advantageous to keep a favorites list of tasks or to filter out tasks that I know I won't use often. Configuring this type of thing is often easier with a GUI.
Coming from a Windows world, I just find it useful to have the build output go into a scrollable (and soon searchable) window. Running from a DOS shell, I sometimes miss information because it scrolled off the top of the buffer. I even find little things like having the timestamp of the output results show up in the header of the output window very helpful.
While Mike didn't mention it, he architected this to allow plugins to this GUI to contribute more tabs. We have considered ideas like a tree view of the dependency or task reports (instead of the ascii art text view). I'm sure there are a lot of other useful things others could contribute.
-- Steve Appling Automated Logic Research Team --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, please visit: http://xircles.codehaus.org/manage_email
