tortoisebzr-developers team mailing list archive

["C. Mundi" <cmundi@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 2:05 AM, Mark Hammond <mhammond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> It seems that a very common operation that a user will want to perform is
> "update this directory so I've got the latest changes others may have made".
>  If I'm working in a checkout, that will usually mean I want to perform an
> update.  If I'm working in a regular branch, I probably want to perform a
> pull - but sometimes the distributed version of bazaar means I may actually
> need to perform a merge/checkin.  The question is: do we want to expose all
> this to the average Tortoise user?  Should "Merge" appear on every context
> menu to cater for this possibility?  If we do, then we also expect the
> Tortoise user to *understand* the various differences, and when to use them.
>  I'd suggest a better approach might be for Tortoise to cater to the
> "common" use cases, leaving the advanced use cases for the command-line
> client, or otherwise suitably "hidden" from the casual bzr user.


Exactly!

Merging concepts, perhaps the options available could be filtered on the fly
by a set of user-editable masks, with one mask for each of the (finite)
"states" TBzr detects in the working directory.  The masks could be
explicitly per-project and implicitly per-user, by storing them in .tbzr or
a similar config file.  The default masks would enable only the most common
use-cases (where "common" might mean something different for the typical
Windows work-fore-hire developer than it does for a kernel hacker).  Users
could edit the masks to determine what they want to see for each "state."
Most folks might never want to edit the masks.  But people who need to,
can.  Everybody wins, because everyone has a choice.

cm