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

[Peter Arrenbrecht]

On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 12:57 AM, Steve Borho <steve at borho.org> wrote:
>
>  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, ...

Steve, can you enlighten me as to why this is? I would have thought
enhancing Nautilus is where there's the bigger payoff.

>  ... 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.

Now that would be a most welcome addition! Please please please go for
it, Germán!

And if I may make personal suggestion, a dialog to map renames/copies
prior to commit à la `hg addremove -s` but that allows me to associate
files interactively (and via similarity) would be welcome.

-parren