Steve, You make some excellent points in your response to Holger. I too find myself always executing an "Update Icons" because the icons are out of sync with the true state of the repository. If I'm going to have to issue a command to obtain the current state of the repo, then moving away from the overlays seems like the correct option.
I will agree with many others that the overlays are a "neat" feature that lets me quickly see that a folder does contain a repository, but if it's not always 100% in sync, the "quick" concept is mute since the status could be incorrect. Your final comments make sense, implement a redundant long term solution which continues to be inline with the future direction of TortoiseHg. It's obvious that this cannot hurt and will provide an immediate "alternative" option if/when the overlays are unable to be maintained. No objection here. George Peters LYNX Technologies, LLC -----Original Message----- From: Steve Borho <[email protected]> To: Holger Hoffstaette <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected], [email protected] Date: Tue, 1 Dec 2009 23:37:17 -0600 Subject: Re: [thg] [thg-dev] End of life for overlay icons > On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 9:23 PM, Holger Hoffstaette > <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Steve, > > > > For me the value is to able to tell immediately whether a directory > is > > under hg control or not, without having to use a popup menu or > anything > > else. If that goes away I might as well drop into the shell directly > and > > not bother with any extensions. > > I really don't understand this change at all; you certainly don't > need to > > color-code all possible state combinations into the icons. Also, > before > > you reinvent yet another browser that will be "alien" on every > platform I > > would think it would be more productive to redesign e.g. the current > > commit GUI. > > Somehow this sounds more like a problem of good Windows integration > vs. > > cross-platform development than anything else..maybe it is time to > abandon > > the idea of a cross platform GUI? TortoiseSVN is successful and works > so > > well because it does not try to please everyone. > > This isn't about platform portability, that just happens to be one of > the benefits that falls out of writing our own PyGtk browser. > > This is about two things: > > 1) Mercurial and TortoiseHg are Python applications, while Explorer is > C++ > > Showing the internal state of a Python application inside a C++ > application is massively complicated, and it has yet to work as well > as anyone has hoped. 0.8 was a great improvement, but even today I > find I must manually refresh the icons fairly frequently, and even > then I often see the icons disappear until I refresh again. The worst > is that I'm not convinced at all that this can ever be made to work to > everyone's expectations. > > 2) Maintaining icon overlays in Explorer is extremely non-trivial, and > for a project with our limited resources, there are better directions > to expend our effort. > > TSVN does not have either of these restrictions, so any comparison > between our and their shell extension carries little weight for me. > They have many times as many developers, several of which are seasoned > Windows developers, and they do not have to overcome this Python/C++ > impedence mismatch (not to mention their 5 year head start). > > Let me explain this another way. Until a Windows developer steps > forward to maintain ownership of the overlays, they are going to be > simply unmaintained until they no longer work at all. At which point > they'll be turned off. In the mean time, I intend to make them as > redundant as possible so people don't miss them (as much) when they > disappear. > > People seem to think I'm trying to turn TortoiseHg into a > TotalCommander clone or something. My intention is closer to adding a > nested directory view with overlays to the status/commit tool. > > -- > Steve Borho > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------- > ------- > Join us December 9, 2009 for the Red Hat Virtual Experience, > a free event focused on virtualization and cloud computing. > Attend in-depth sessions from your desk. Your couch. Anywhere. > http://p.sf.net/sfu/redhat-sfdev2dev > _______________________________________________ > Tortoisehg-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tortoisehg-discuss > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Join us December 9, 2009 for the Red Hat Virtual Experience, a free event focused on virtualization and cloud computing. Attend in-depth sessions from your desk. Your couch. Anywhere. http://p.sf.net/sfu/redhat-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ Tortoisehg-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tortoisehg-discuss
