RE: scheduling, and gui clients (Win, Mac)

> *PLEASE* don't use WinCVS as a base. My god, that UI is one of the worst
> I've seen in a while.

And hence my call for comments on GUI features... :-)

> SourceSafe is the only other GUI-based version control that I've used, and
> it is quite nice. I'd hope to see something like that, than the
> continuation
> of bastard UIs like WinCVS.

I have a fair amount of experience with SourceSafe and have a copy lying
around here somewhere. Obviously, the two products have quite different
models (e.g., pessimistic vs. optimistic locking), but I can
compare/contrast them when working out a proposed GUI.

Have you had success with any of the other CVS GUIs? Subversion is closer in
operation to CVS than SourceSafe, so I'm giving CVS GUIs additional weight
in design considerations.

> I imagine part of WinCVS's problem comes from how it wraps around the the
> CVS client with minimal change.

I'm willing to bet the author of WinCVS looked upon that as a virtue. If my
understanding of CVS history is accurate, the GUIs came on well after CVS
was in wide use. If so, making the GUI work like the command-line client
would accelerate adoption.

In our case, Subversion hopefully will have a GUI (or two, ...) by the time
it's getting wide use, so we're not tied in quite the same way.

> As a result, it propagates the
> I/O messages
> and its working model (e.g. select a particular command to do this/that).
> With a proper UI, there are many intuitive ways to avoid that nastiness.

I understand the note on I/O messages. While I like the transcript pane, it
should be toggle-able on/off, proabably off by default. Or were you
referring to something else?

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "its working model". Could you
elaborate?

Mark Murphy
Systems Engineer
CollabNet, Inc.
mmurphy@collab.net
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:15 2006