On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 9:23 PM, Holger Hoffstaette <holger.hoffstae...@googlemail.com> wrote: > > Steve, > > For me the value is to able to tell immediately whether a directory is > under hg control or not, without having to use a popup menu or anything > else. If that goes away I might as well drop into the shell directly and > not bother with any extensions. > I really don't understand this change at all; you certainly don't need to > color-code all possible state combinations into the icons. Also, before > you reinvent yet another browser that will be "alien" on every platform I > would think it would be more productive to redesign e.g. the current > commit GUI. > Somehow this sounds more like a problem of good Windows integration vs. > cross-platform development than anything else..maybe it is time to abandon > the idea of a cross platform GUI? TortoiseSVN is successful and works so > well because it does not try to please everyone.
This isn't about platform portability, that just happens to be one of the benefits that falls out of writing our own PyGtk browser. This is about two things: 1) Mercurial and TortoiseHg are Python applications, while Explorer is C++ Showing the internal state of a Python application inside a C++ application is massively complicated, and it has yet to work as well as anyone has hoped. 0.8 was a great improvement, but even today I find I must manually refresh the icons fairly frequently, and even then I often see the icons disappear until I refresh again. The worst is that I'm not convinced at all that this can ever be made to work to everyone's expectations. 2) Maintaining icon overlays in Explorer is extremely non-trivial, and for a project with our limited resources, there are better directions to expend our effort. TSVN does not have either of these restrictions, so any comparison between our and their shell extension carries little weight for me. They have many times as many developers, several of which are seasoned Windows developers, and they do not have to overcome this Python/C++ impedence mismatch (not to mention their 5 year head start). Let me explain this another way. Until a Windows developer steps forward to maintain ownership of the overlays, they are going to be simply unmaintained until they no longer work at all. At which point they'll be turned off. In the mean time, I intend to make them as redundant as possible so people don't miss them (as much) when they disappear. People seem to think I'm trying to turn TortoiseHg into a TotalCommander clone or something. My intention is closer to adding a nested directory view with overlays to the status/commit tool. -- Steve Borho ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Join us December 9, 2009 for the Red Hat Virtual Experience, a free event focused on virtualization and cloud computing. Attend in-depth sessions from your desk. Your couch. Anywhere. http://p.sf.net/sfu/redhat-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ Tortoisehg-develop mailing list Tortoisehg-develop@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tortoisehg-develop
