RabbitVCS

Hi all, you may have noticed me rummaging around lately.  I’ve been pretty much absent for a handful of years, but I got an itch recently to get back involved.  Thanks go to Daniel for picking up the slack while I and others were dormant and moving us into modern times with Github!

My goal with this release was to get RabbitVCS running fairly well on modern systems, to merge in the many generously contributed (and long ignored) pull requests that have accumulated the past few years, and to fix as many bugs as I could find and reproduce.  I went through most of the issues backlog to pick off what I could with limited time, and I feel like I reached a pretty good checkpoint to create a tag.  There are a few minor enhancements in the mix, but this contains mostly fixes for bugs and crashes.  You can grab the v0.17 files here.

Regarding packages, Jason has stepped down as our resident packager for Ubuntu.  He’s done a great job over the years and I’m not really sure what’s going to happen with that.  If someone wants to step up I’m glad to help them however I can.  There are also packages in Fedora that we’ll want to update, though I don’t have a hand in that.  In the meantime, I would advise you to just install manually using the updated README as your guide.  The only changes in terms of dependencies listed is tkinter for python, which was unfortunately added for some one-off (though useful) git client changes.  I’d like to eventually replace these with gtk+ dialogs.

As for the future, here is a short list of some goals I have:

• One pull request I merged introduced some modifications that should help with an eventual shift to python3, which I’d like to complete at some point.
• Move us entirely onto Gtk+3 and gobject introspection, as we’re currently stuck with pygtk2 for our dialog windows.
• Improve the performance and memory usage of the Nautilus extension, which should help with larger repositories.  In addition, I found a bug in Nautilus that is preventing our context menus from working fully correctly and I’m hoping to get that resolved soon for a future Nautilus release.
• Regarding the wiki and website, they are quite out-dated and I’d like to move the wiki to Github and consolidate a bit.
• Hopefully get the Gedit plugin working again.  It broke when they switched to python3.  I spent a little time on it but it seems like there were underlying changes to the Gedit plugin API and I don’t have the time right now to dive in.

So there is lots to do just to stay above water level here, and I can’t promise what will get done.  New features will probably be on hold until some of these more important things happen, so feel free to jump in.

Thanks!
Adam