RabbitVCS

It has been about 10 months in the pipeline, but we’ve finally got something ready for people to actually start using and testing.  v0.14 will be a pretty ambitious release, actually.  Indeed, what we’re attempting to do hasn’t really been done yet, at least as far as I know.  In addition to continuing to support subversion as a version control client, we’re attempting to support the git version control system as well, using the same basic dialogs and the same codebase.

When I first designed and programmed the interface for RabbitVCS v0.12, I used TortoiseSVN on windows as my main inspiration, for the most part cloning its look and feel.  However, with this release I faced two main problems.  The first is that there aren’t any (or any that i saw) visual git clients that are integrated into a file manager and/or attempt to allow the user to control everything from the UI.  The second issue is that there aren’t any visual clients that I know of that support more than one back-end version control system.  So when I went about designing and implementing the system, I had to figure out how to solve many problems using my own intuition and common sense, and I am the first to admit that I may have been wrong about some stuff.  That is what this beta release is for.  I NEED YOUR HELP.  I need you to download and install this beta release and work with it to find its flaws and problems, because there are probably a lot.  But I know that there is also a lot of good in this release too, and I can’t wait to hear what you guys think.

So aside from git support what else is new?  Not a whole log, actually, aside from various bug fixes.  Git was the main focus.  However, there is one nifty change that people should like, and that is that the nautilus extension is now completely non-blocking.  Context menus will load asynchronously now.

Since the git support is so “experimental”, I’m planning on releasing at least two betas before we do the final release.  Your help is needed to test and report bugs or other issues, so that we can make a great final v0.14 release.

A quick note about installation:

In order to have the git support enabled, you need to have dulwich (http://samba.org/~jelmer/dulwich/) installed.  Dulwich is a low-level pure-python implemention of git.  Unfortunately for us, it is a bit too low level for our interests, so I’ve had to spend a lot of time and effort on writing a high-level layer on top of it that RabbitVCS can use.  dulwich is probably going to be transitioned out eventually, but for now it is a requirement.

Homepage:

http://www.rabbitvcs.org

Download RabbitVCS v0.14 beta1 at:

http://wiki.rabbitvcs.org/wiki/download

Note: Jason is working on debian/ubuntu packages, they should be available shortly.

Issue Tracker:

http://code.google.com/p/rabbitvcs/issues/list

A big thanks and a great job to everyone on the team and everyone who

contributed to this release!

Adam

P.S. for people who didn’t receive my message from a week or so ago titled “Development Updates”, you need nautilus-python 0.7.0 in order to have the nautilus extension completely asynchronous.  Some distros have 0.7.0 by default (like Fedora 14), but Ubuntu and Debian are still on 0.6.1 and they may not update to 0.7.0 by the next release (the package maintainer is on the fritz).  So you may have to install it yourself from the tarball.  I was talking to Jason and he may be able to provide a debian package for nautilus-python 0.7.0 in our PPA.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 27th, 2010 at 5:31 pm and is filed under Release. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.