Re: How uniform can GUI clients be?

On Tue, 30 Jan 2001, Joerg Bullmann wrote:

> So, to come to my point: how *uniform* can an SVN client be?

I totally agree that it might be hard to make really intuitive interfaces for
different platforms that are uniform and still match the paradigms and
peculiarities of those particular platforms.

Still, just guessing here, most platforms would probably use the same
approach and only the Mac would differ.

I would also like to point out that there doesn't have to be a single view.
Compare to the Clearcase GUI-viewer, in which you can select to display the
file tree in different ways, just as you can in most 'file explorer' type of
applications.

How people like to view things may not differ depending on what platform they
use, but on purely personal preferenses and ways of thinking.

> How should the SVN commands be represented? I'd suggest an "SVN" menu
> with entries for all SVN commands.

I'd say that there shouldn't be a need for a menu with "SVN commands".
There's a GUI and the "commands" should be replaced with GUI operations as
far as possible. Of course, allowing some commands and a shell prompt for
power users is still a feature that could be left in there but I'd prefer if
the GUI would not feel like just a fancy layer ontop of the SVN command line
commands. I'd want that a GUI-user shouldn't need nor have to know the SVN
client commands.

> Do we want a log window that shows all the server responses? I like it.
> But I think I recall someone (was it one of the Greg(g)s?) speaking out
> vehemently against it some time ago. My memory might fool me here.

I'm against it. Sure, it can *exist* if you select to enable it and if you
wanna do some under-the-surface debugging and see exactly what the server did
say. But I think that the GUI should present information and progress data to
prevent the need for a "server log".

Compare to when you copy files using your file browser on a GUI system, you
drap and drop the files and they are copied or moved with some indicator
showing that they are moved/copied. You do not get a window where all the
copy-lines are shown and you do not select a "command menu" where copy is
picked.

> A GUI SVN client could offer simple diff and conflict viewing features.

I'd say this is one of the areas where a GUI client can show its power. A
really fancy diff viewer in different colours or traces what was done between
versions. Things that are tricky on a shell prompt and gets easier/nicer
within a GUI.

> Hope my ideas can help here and spark off a bit of detail discussion. I'd
> love to meet up with people to talk through this in kind of a workshop,

Well, mailing back and forth is a pretty good start imho.

-- 
      Daniel Stenberg - http://daniel.haxx.se - +46-705-44 31 77
   ech`echo xiun|tr nu oc|sed 'sx\([sx]\)\([xoi]\)xo un\2\1 is xg'`ol