[msysGit] Re: [Tortoisehg-discuss] Bazzar stratgy regarding shell extension

[Stefan Küng]

Peer Sommerlund wrote:

On 19/04/2008, *Stefan Küng* <[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote:

    Peer Sommerlund wrote:

        I'm crosposting this to all tortoises I know of - the Windows
        Overlay problem is relevant to all.

        (//git-cheetah //is a tortoise in disguise)

            > [copy of

http://bazaar-vcs.org/bzr/bzr.dev/doc/developers/tortoise-strategy.txt]

        [Peer] I think that the TortoiseOverlay component could evolve
        into a separate project, were some of the features mentioned in
        the bzr tortoise strategy (space-efficient DLL architecture,
        separate tortoise-processes) would fit nicely, and benefit all
        tortoises.


    [Stefan] I'm not sure what exactly you want to improve here.

After I have thought some more about it I realise that it is probably NOT a good idea to try to build a generalized stub. The analysis by Mark Hammond indicates that script-based tortoises (TBZR and THG) will get version conflicts and bloated memory usage. The proposed solution is a small C++ client that calls a server application (in Python). As you have explained, TSVN has a similar structure, but for different reasons. The client TortoiseStub allows you to select which of three modes to use (cache/shell/none), and the server TortoiseCache can crawl the file system to give faster display of overlay icons.

The TortoiseStub is not to select which mode to use but only to prevent apps other than explorer.exe from loading the extension dlls. The mode 'switch' is done in the TortoiseSVN dll.

It makes sense for TBZR and THG to share code for the tortoise stub (the client), but why should any other tortoises want a common code base?

The consequence would be
(1) wider audience means that tortoisestub would be tested more.
(2) complexity increases by generalizing TSVN stub instead of forking it.

The first is void for TSVN as they have a large audience, and the code has been tested for a while. Refactoring the code would only destabilize it. The latter is an argument against common code. Conclusion: TBZR and THG should do their own stub, probably by forking TSVN code.

Stefan

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I'm still not quite sure what code exactly you want to share between the Tortoise clients. Calling the status process would definitely not work, since it would not only be the status that's cached (at least TSVN caches a lot more info than just the status - in fact it caches all information that is available from the working copy). So if you would want to share that code, you'd have to either get a list of information that all Tortoise clients could cache - which means a *lot* of overhead since I doubt that the different versioning systems have a lot of that information in common.

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