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Unix user finds interface counterintuitive

From: M4N - Jasper Floor <jasper.floor_at_m4n.nl>
Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 12:08:38 +0200

To whom it may concern,

I just helped a colleague who is not a developer get on svn. I am a
Debian (or Ubuntu) user who runs windows to play games that crash wine.
I am familiar with svn and have tried numerous clients. The attractive
thing about Tortoise is the integration into explorer. I had already
seen this so I was fairly confident this would be a good tool. Setting
things up however is probably impossible for a non-technical user (who
doesnt read documentation) and fairly hard for someone who thinks he is
familiar with svn.

The main problem being that once you've actually done the work, Tortoise
behaves like you haven't. What I mean by this is that after importing a
directory into version control it acts like you haven't. Even though you
can see the files in the repository. This is because Tortoise requires
you to make a clean checkout. I would expect the files/directories you
just added to be made into your working copy, since that is what they
are. I finally had to resort to actually reading the Tortoise manual,
which explains things clearly btw and thank you very much.

What would work better is when clicking on an unversioned file/directory
(in an unversioned tree) there was an option 'add to repository' and
that it will add that file/directory and make you local copy into your
working copy. I feel this would be more intuitive. It cost me about 15
minutes to get things working (including waiting for our way to slow
internet connection). Naturally before I was called there was some
figuring things out by oneself phase. So there is actually quite a bit
of time lost.

While I don't expect to start using Tortoise anytime soon (I'm not a
windows user remember), I can imagine having to support someone using
it. I really do like your explorer integration. This note is merely to
help you make the user experience better.

mvg,
Jasper Floor

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Received on 2009-05-07 12:11:38 CEST

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