Google Summer of Code Proposal: File manager integration for Linux.

[Steve Borho]

On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 18:13 -0400, Germán Poó-Caamaño wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-03-31 at 21:48 -0500, Steve Borho wrote:
> > On Mon, 2008-03-31 at 22:09 -0400, Germán Poó-Caamaño wrote:
> > > I sent the following proposal for GSoC.  Some personal information
> > > was added in the detailed description.
> > > 
> > > I just read about another proposal about Shell integration (Nautilus
> > > and Windows), but it was detailed just for Windows environment. I 
> > > hope this does not mean any conflict in any place.
> > 
> > Are you aware of the work done to integrate TortoiseHg into Nautilus?
> > 
> > http://tortoisehg.wiki.sourceforge.net/Nautilus
> 
> I wasn't aware of that integration. That's great (even if my proposal
> gets weak in this part).
> 
> > It is still experimental in quality (mostly because of strange behavior
> > in nautilus-python itself), and could use quite a bit of work, but a lot
> > of the obvious parts have been done.  In fact, I think I borrowed some
> > of this initial work from you :)
> 
> Nice to hear it was useful :-)
> 
> As far as I see, submenus "works" with nautilus-python 0.5; which is not
> available on Fedora 8 or Ubuntu 7.10.  It is possible to made a backport
> if you want to give it a try.  I did it (back in January in order to
> test if another bug were fixed), but currently I'm running Hardy.
> 
> Certainly, I would like to see TortoiseHG/Nautilus stable. I will
> give it a try tomorrow night.

Sounds great.

> In my proposal I wrote two goals: one of them was the plugin but the
> another one was building a GUI (consistent with the plugin interface),
> in order to provide the features that are not possible to get using the
> File Manager.
> 
> As application I had in my mind something like Giggle, which is a 
> GUI for git (http://developer.imendio.com/projects/giggle).
> 
> Probably I will need to focus my proposal on Thunar or write a new one.
> I would like receive feedback.

I think an app similar to giggle would be highly appreciated, but I
would suggest that you start with the changelog browser already included
with TortoiseHg and work out from there.  It already has a lot of the
pieces that you do not want to write from scratch (some of which could
take all summer on their own).

It's likely that the application work would be more broadly useful than
the nautilus work, but would also require significant effort.  You could
knock off a lot of the long-term TortoiseHg TODOs if you integrated a
well designed working directory browser and commit tool directly into
the changelog app.

TK or I would probably volunteer to be a mentor if you picked this
approach for your application.

-- 
Steve Borho (steve at borho.org)
http://www.borho.org/~steve/steve.asc
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