Hi all, I'm delighted to say there have been quite a few patches in the past few months, probably more than in all other years combined! I'd like to thank all who have sent patches.
Anybody else with an idea for a tweak, jump in! Meld is still pretty small and not very complex. You'll almost certainly get a good return for time invested. I say this because for me, meld is mostly complete - it does what I want it to do and I've gotten used to its quirks. A very large proportion of bugzilla bugs are of the "quirk" variety and unlikely to be addressed unless a patch is provided :) For the record, I'd also like to set out some larger scale tasks which I've always had at the back of my mind. These are several areas where I knew meld was weak through accidents of bad design, missing api, language features and patience respectively. Now if I could only get a few weeks off ... Move diff computation into a separate process. Meld would talk to the diff server over a nonblocking unix socket. This would eliminate one of the biggest ui annoyances - the slow edit update. The server could easily be multithreaded without inducing threading complexity into the main meld ui. Most of this can be written without any knowledge of meld. Also, it could be shared with all other gui diff tools. Use GtkUiManager The UI was written for gtk 1.99 (!) and has not changed massively since then. Changing to UI manager would get rid of the clunky "double toolbar", remove some redundant clutter and allow some improvements like a menu for common preference settings (tab size, filters, etc) without having to go through the preferences dialog. Keyboard-abilty is easier too. Use a proper tasklets library. Python2.5 gave us proper coroutines and a choice of tasklet libraries which would make the UI snappier. e.g. no more ui-blocking VC operations Use real widgets for patching buttons. I couldn't find a way to use real gtk widgets in the textview or middle bar when scrolling without running into performance problems. The hand drawn ones look quite naff. Many people don't even know they are clickable. Happy hacking, Stephen. _______________________________________________ meld-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/meld-list
