Mercurial GUI tools (was Re: Mercurial at the Kernel Summit)

[Rafael Villar Burke]

Chad Netzer wrote:

>On Tue, 2005-07-19 at 22:34 -0700, Matt Mackall wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Linus gave a GIT demo on Monday night at the end of which he said he'd
>>be reevaluating his choice of SCMs after six months (so three months
>>from now) and that right now the only real alternative was Mercurial.
>>    
>>
>
>Matt (or anyone else),
>
>   Do you know what GUI frontend tools now exist, or are in development,
>for Mercurial repositories?  I'll soon be delightfully free of the
>burden of employment (*cough*laidoff*cough*), and am thinking of a new
>GUI project to help me develop some of my ideas about
>Model-View-Presenter architectures (and implementations of such).
>
>   If there are already good tools in development, I have a few other
>projects to work on, but a Mercurial frontend would be a useful and
>challenging project.
>
>   Some quick snooping on the wiki page didn't indicate anything in
>development; anyone on the list working on one?
>  
>
Matt posted some time ago some gui code using pygtk, but without the 
glade file describing the interface. I don't know if that project is 
still alive.

As a personal preference, and IMHO, pygtk is really a good choice for a 
GUI, as it works very well on a lot of platforms using free tools (for 
instance, BitTorrent, pythonCAD, WingIDE or Gazpacho use it, and they 
target at least the most used platforms seamlessly). Probably Qt is also 
a reasonable choice, but ATM there's no free python bindings to use the 
now free Qt4. That would make it ususable on windows without a license 
to distribute the binaries or without using cygwin to do so (a barrier 
to try it and get Win32 contributors, IMO).

Besides the toolkit used to build the interface, I like a lot how 
tortoiseSVN works, integrating with the shell and making it really easy 
to work with it. The same could be done in Nautilus (Gnome) AFAICT, but 
probably in KDE and others too.

Take care,

Rafael Villar Burke