Things that could be better for GUIs

[TK Soh]

On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 6:52 PM, Steven Borho <steve at borho.org> wrote:
>
> On Feb 28, 2009, at 4:07 AM, Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>
> TortoiseHg has worked around most of the annoyances, so it's not as
> much of an issue for us.
>
> The biggest problems right now are lack of progress indicators, and
> the cost of calculating
> overlays on large repositories.

Having a 'formal' API layer to mercurial internal will be good. While
we managed to work around for now, tracking changes in mercurial core
remains a major task, and hopeful improve backwark compatibility.
TortoiseHg versions often have to break compatibility with older
releases of Mercurial, making testing and upgrading difficult tasks.

IMO, if the Mercurial dev team really want to focus on the core
development, then they should at least try to make it easier for
others to create non-core features that are often very useful also.

It should benefit any mercurial clients or derivatives.