RabbitVCS

Yesterday I spent all day working on the reincarnation of the status monitor. Basically what this means is that I started from scratch, worked out the ideal architecture based on past experience and starting reassembling the extension by copying code from trunk and the old status monitor back in (reviewing it and improving it wherever needed).

I’m far from done, for example I haven’t yet started on implementing the ideas for the auto-updating status tree, but it’s starting to look pretty descent. Besides obviously removing a lot of crud by refactoring, here’s what major things have been done so far:

• Reimplemented the status monitor, but this time using gio.GFileMonitor. Not only does this mean that NautilusSvn will run on all systems that support GFileMonitor (e.g. *BSD) but the resulting code is even prettier!
• Moved to using anyvc for the VCS Abstraction Layer. This library was originally developed for usage with PIDA, a Python IDE. This means that there’s now free emblem handling for at least Subversion, Bazaar, Git, Monotone, Mercurial, Darcs. So no matter what VCS you use you will always see pretty emblems!

What’s still missing:

• The context menu. I still have to port this to using anyvc.
• The entire GUI Layer. This also has to be ported.
• The status tree implementation as discussed on the Architecture wiki page.

If you’re interested you can take a look at the resulting code. Once I get this branch into shape I’ll start making development snapshots so everybody can play around with it.

In other news thanks to Vadim Peretokin I figured out what was causing the Launchpad buildbot to fail on building NautilusSvn, turns out I was missing a few build-dependencies that were required because of commands called from the Python distutils script (pkg-config and gtk-update-icon-cache). Thanks Vadim!