[darcs-users] GUI

Erik Bågfors zindar at gmail.com
Tue Dec 14 10:19:18 UTC 2004


On Mon, 13 Dec 2004 18:33:30 -0500, Max Battcher <me at worldmaker.net> wrote:
> Michael Conrad wrote:
> > There's always the possibility of whipping together some Delphi (or heaven
> > forbid, VB) code with an XML reader and just pipe commands to the darcs
> > windows executable.  Its not clean, and its not portable, but it would make
> > a nice impression on the windows people.  A sufficiently motivated person
> > could probably whip up the essentials in a weekend.
> 
> I was thinking about the possibility of doing one in my current "home"
> language, C#, which like your VB/Delphi examples I probably could whip
> up most of it in a weekend.  As for portability, the Mono project
> provides more and more .NET portability.  I could try for ultimate
> portability and target GTK# (I'd have to learn it, first, though), or
> hope Mono's cross-platform System.Windows.Forms is coming along far
> enough to support all I would need (I heard its extremely close).

Since I follow the Mono project somewhat,

SWF in mono is moving at a good pace but it's still not stable,
changing alot, and it mostly in the development branch and not in the
stable branch.  Therefor I think you should do either
1) Use GTK# for both windows and linux or
2) Use SWF on windows and GTK# on linux.  This is lot's more job but
still doable.
3) Just do a SWF program anyway.

I would go with option 1 since it's less work and gtk can look very
much like a native windows program nowadays.

I'd be interested in helping if you start this. I have been thinking
about the same thing.  I think starting with a darcs class that can
call all darcs functions is a good way to start, than adding a gui
around that.
 
Option 3 is simply only for windows use yet. It's where the program is
needed most and someday in the future you can change it to do GTK# as
well, or simply wait until mono's SWF is more mature.

> > Also, darcs has a nice enough command line interface that I can't see why a
> > person who is familiar with the command line would ever want a GUI for it.
> > So maybe a windows-only GUI isn't so bad.
> 
> I have to agree...  what little I've played with it (and I haven't had
> as much time as I would have liked) its commands were much kinder than
> is typical.  But some people aren't comfortable/familiar with the
> command line in the windows world any more...

I agree 100%

Regards,
Erik




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