Change in strategy

Adam and I have come to the conclusion that the new status monitor that is needed to keep emblems up-to-date can not be included in the upcoming release, it’s simply not yet ready for production usage (among other things see Issues 4, 8, 89 and 90).

As we don’t see how we can significantly improve things with a few tweaks here or there we’ve decided to instead work on removing the status monitor completely for the time being and only have a status checker (similar to the situation in v0.11, but more elegant). We’ll also get the rest of the code up to production quality.

Regretfully, without the new status monitor we are not able to detect changes to files that are not directly visible in the Nautilus window. So if you’re in the directory /foo but the file /foo/bar/baz (baz) is added the emblems for foo and bar will not change to modified (assuming the status before was normal). This also means you cannot use the command-line svn client and expect emblems to be kept up-to-date.

UPDATE: actually after implementing the new status checker it turns out the above isn’t entirely correct. If you do alll VCS actions through NautilusSvn and don’t use the command-line all emblems will remain up-to-date. There seem to be two situations where we can’t keep emblems up-to-date:

  • If you’re in /foo and /foo/bar/baz is modified the status for /foo and /foo/bar will be incorrect. Nautilus doesn’t inform us about these modifications (which makes sense for normal extensions). The new status monitor is required to be able to do this.
  • If you’re in /foo and /foo/bar is “normal” and you add /foo/bar/baz by selecting NautilusSvn -> Add from the context menu of /foo. We’re only rechecking the paths you originally selected and any item you saw that was either “added”,  “deleted”, “replaced”, “modified”, “missing”, “unversioned”, or “incomplete”. There might be something I can think up here that might not impact performance all too badly.

Hopefully we will be able to get the status monitor ready for v0.13.

3 responses to “Change in strategy”

  1. Michael says:

    But I assume hitting F5 would update everything anyways? Perhaps I am an impulsive F5 hitter when it comes to tools like this, so it wouldn’t affect me anyways. :)

  2. @Michael: sorry for the late response, I assumed it wouldn’t but after a initial verification it seemed I was wrong. I’m working on implementing the new status checker now and yes, F5 will work to refresh a directory and get the correct emblems.

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