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

From: Ben Collins-Sussman [mailto:sussman@newton.collab.net]

> Bill Tutt <billtut@microsoft.com> writes:

> > Speaking of GUI clients, I didn't seem to notice any in-progress
> > notification callbacks in svn_ra.h, or svn_wc.h which are generally a
good
> > thing for robust GUI client/server apps.

> This is a good idea; we want to start filling out svn_ra.h now
> anyway.

> I think our ability to "compose editors" is a good step in solving
> this GUI problem. I suspect that if SVN users are ever waiting
> around, it will be because they're waiting on an editor to commit or
> update over the network.

> For example: right now, we have a "trace" editor which is composed
> with the main update-editor; as the update editor patches the working
> copy, the trace editor intercepts and prints status codes and
> filenames. For somebody writing a GUI, they could compose their own
> editor which provides graphical progress-feedback instead.

Ah yes, I see what you mean.

> Is this sufficient?

Well, the composing concept should be sufficient (from the SVN library code
standpoint), it still appears like svn_ra.h and possibly some of the other
operations need to be tweaked a little bit so that this is possible, but
yeah it should be.

GUI client writers still need to be careful about avoiding the Outlook
problem. WinCVS doesn't care about it since it just spawns actual cvs client
processes.

Here's an additional idea that might help flesh the tracing editor
composition bits out and help create useful robustness test cases:

If somebody ever gets a chance, someone could write up a robustness test
harness for working copy operations.
Write up a "tracing" editor that randomly fails, or fails at specific
points, and see if life is still sane after the failure.

Bill
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:15 2006