Saturday, September 08, 2012

Improvements to rabbitvcs

RabbitVCS is handy for those making the jump from TortoiseSVN in windows. I usually make do with svn log / git log and the command line, but as part of my new work there's often horrible user names (think completely numeric) and commit messages that are just a pain to trawl through.

So, I've turned to RabbitVCS to fill in a gap. I managed to heckle the maintainers, and a release was put out not long after. Neat, I thought - but I saw their issue tracker, and saw patches languishing without love.

I started out with triage, and highlighting patches that could be implemented. Even then, it still wasn't working for me. I added a few bug fix patches; posted to the mailing lists, etc - a few got accepted, but overwhelmingly there was silence.

Unfortunately when I get interested in hacking away at something, I'll put in a few hours - uploading static .diff files and abandoning them in my local working copy was getting a bit annoying, and I suspect the folks on the devel lists were unprepared for a patch flood.

So... I've mirrored it, and then forked it onto my github account. I've put it back to the developers that I'll keep mirroring, and help them migrate if they so choose.


I give you 6 distinct bug or feature requests.

  • Filter log dialogs by typing in text
  • Copy log messages to clipboard using a context menu or ctrl + c
  • Refresh commit dialogs
  • Hit escape / ctrl + w / ctrl + q to close dialogs (well, most of them, there's a lot and it's boring to implement).
and there are less bugs overall.

I learnt a fair amount about python's GTK libraries, which turned out to be all pretty straight forward if a little tedious to work with at times - text buffer wants to force me to use an iterator, rrrr.


That aside, to get your hands on the latest:
$ git clone git://github.com/CloCkWeRX/rabbitvcs.git
$ sudo python setup.py install

And the first time you do this, you'll need to fix permissions on the config
$ sudo chown -R you:you ~/.config/rabbitvcs/

To test, it's pretty simple - go find a Git or SVN repository, and type:
$ rabbitvcs

If you spot errors, check the latest bugs and report. Hopefully either folks will swap over to the new github home without much angst (I'll transfer it to a github org of theirs if needed), or the patches will get applied against SVN.



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