WinSVN: Initial questions

I've been quietly fiddling with the glass of WinSVN (Windows GUI atop Subversion). My plan is to hold off on the COM wrapper around the client API until Milestone 2, then plug the glass and the back end together.

I have two fairly fundamental questions to pose to the team:

When To Host Code?
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I have a GUI that is reasonably functional, given that none of Subversion is actually plugged in yet...

I wasn't planning on asking for CVS space for it until I had released the COM wrapper and had a functioning first version of the GUI. However, if you prefer, I can clean up what I have and post it now. It doesn't matter a ton to me -- it's merely a matter of timing.

Are You Guys Going to Shoot Me?
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My goal is to create the best possible GUI in the least possible time (this isn't my full-time role). As such, I made an eminently practical decision that may cause you gastro-intestinal distress:

I've written it in Visual Basic.

<pause for groans>

For rapid GUI development, nothing I've seen touches VB on Win32. I've written C++ GUIs before, and I think that's when I lost most of my hair. In ~15 hours of effort, I've created a GUI shell that has a better look than WinCVS and on par with SourceSafe and Perforce (IMHO -- you'll be able to judge for yourself shortly). That'd have taken me forever and a day in C++.

I realize fully that VB is not the norm for Open Source development. It just makes no sense for me to try to do it in C++. It's also part of the reason why I'm planning on building the COM wrapper (in C++), in case somebody might want to build a C++ GUI sometime in the future.

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Give me your input on these two points, and I'll know how to proceed from there.

Mark Murphy
mmurphy@collab.net
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:16 2006