'Othertools' page in a shockingly bad state

[Kevin Bullock]

On Mar 18, 2013, at 11:40 AM, Christopher Jefferson wrote:

> I am a beginner mercurial user. Just today, I googled for 'mercurial gui'. The first link is: mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/OtherTools . Looks good. Let's have a look through the first few options?
> 
> TortoiseHg - seems fine, but for some reason I can't get it to run on my machine (but this is a seperate issue).
> 
> but, now things go bad quickly:
> 
> HgkExtension - Oh, included by default with Mercurial. That must mean it's good? I'll just use that. Except when I click on it, I'm told it is an 'unloved feature', and only kept for backwards compatability.
> 
> Push Me Pull You - never released, not updated since 2008
> gpyfm - Webpage gone, wiki page tells me it has "unresolved bugs and has been shelved"
> meld - good diffing tool I've used before
> Diffuse - released version old, but might be under active development.
> hgdiff- not updated in about a year, couldn't get to work
> hgct - tells me it hasn't been updated since 2007 on this very web page!
> 
> Seeing as this page is the first thing that comes up when searching for mercurial guis, I would suggest (as a user) this is a very important page, particularly as users looking for guis might want some hand-holding.
> 
> I would personally recommend a complete-blank approach, and listing just 2 or 3 (at most!) GUIs, which users can trust. Having a separately linked page with a list of all GUIs could be a good idea too, but having a dump of broken and unmaintained software I do not feel does mercurial any good.
> 
> I might have tried to tidy up the page myself, but this page (sensibly I suspect) is immutable. This might however also be what has let it get into such a bad state.
> 
> I hope this does not come across as too insulting, I really like mercurial, I think it is a shame the first page many people find when looking for a GUI is so confusing.

Thanks for bringing it up. I've just done a bit of an overhaul on the GUI Tools section -- see what you think.

pacem in terris / мир / शान्ति / ‎‫سَلاَم‬ / 平和
Kevin R. Bullock