Things that could be better for GUIs

[Bastian Doetsch]

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Am 28.02.2009 um 11:07 schrieb Dirkjan Ochtman:

> So I've heard some rumbling in #mercurial about the codebase from  
> those who've implemented GUIs on top of hg; that would be muggs  
> (THG), ronny (PIDA) and bfrog (CuteHG). bastiand (MercurialEclipse)  
> may also be interested. I'd like to hear what things could be  
> improved, and how.

Thanks, Dirkjan, good idea :).

>
>
> Once this discussion has come up with some points, we should  
> probably put an extract in the wiki, to prevent it from getting lost.
>
> This will (obviously) not go into 1.2, but I at least think it would  
> be useful to reason about all of your concerns about the current ways.

Generally, I'm quite content how interfacing Mercurial works. There  
are some issues though:

- - Authentication is a problem: Mercurial switches automatically to non- 
interactive mode when not called in a terminal. Rather unfortunate for  
hg sign, repository authentication and so on. Possible solution:  
Provide means to pass user and password via command line.

- -  When calling the Mercurial executable, big repositories get a huge  
performance penality, as text transformation has to be done in  
Mercurial (templates/styles) and in the calling program, as it needs  
to parse all that information.

- - Mercurial doesn't provide progress indications.

- - It's hard to determine, which options/commands are available  
(parsing hg help is no fun...)

- - Rename tracking is not available in hg cat (if I find time to learn  
enough python, I'll fix it myself).

That's it for now :). Even though these issues are present, I still  
like Mercurial a lot and it's a good "backend" to interface it. None  
of these points is imho critical, they would nicely enhance our work,  
though.

Best regards, Bastian

>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Dirkjan
>




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