So I have an interesting experiment going on: a group of
not-very-technical OS X users is using subversion to collaborate on a
large collection of binary files. (Musical scores, to be precise.)
They're using a combination of the svn commandline client and the Mac
Finder plugin "scplugin", which simply wraps the commandline client.
Because the files are binary, they're all marked with
'svn:needs-lock', and the users are all locking files before editing,
then allowing 'svn commit' to unlock them. Just as we designed.
But the complaint I keep hearing is that it's not easy to get a quick
overview of "who has which files locked". It's hampering their
communication. The current UI choices are pretty lame:
1. 'svn st -u' shows remote locks, but not owners. Users have to run
an incredibly awkward 'svn info URL' command on each file to see
who locked it.
2. 'svn ls -v directory' shows remote locks and their owners too, but
only within the immediate directory. And it's full of noise;
users don't want to see all files, just the locked ones. Adding
'-R' makes the noise even worse.
I think this is a big usability weakness in our UI. We need something
better.
The irony is that we *already* have a single RA command to "fetch all
locks below a repository path". We even have an example program
(tools/examples/getlocks_test.c) which demonstrates it.
For now, I think I'm going to build the getlocks_test binary on OS X
and just give it to this team to use as a workaround. But I'd love to
hear ideas about how to make the commandline client itself more
usable. (For GUI tools like TSVN, I imagine some sort of "locks
report" would be a nice thing to add.)
Thoughts?
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Received on Wed Jan 4 17:53:01 2006