RabbitVCS

Hi all, sorry for leaving everyone hanging for so long.  I’m still alive, but I haven’t been working on RabbitVCS much over the past several months and because of that, there hasn’t been much to say.  The good news is that I’ve just released nautilus-python 1.1, which adds pygobject 3 compatibility (needed for GNOME 3.2), and I’ve fixed some major bugs in the RabbitVCS Nautilus 3 extension, which gets it working pretty well for me in GNOME 3.0 and GNOME 3.2.  There is a good chance I’ll do a release soon, just to get GNOME 3.x working for all of you who have been patiently waiting.  This release might not have many other fixes or enhancements to speak about, but it will at least get things moving in the right direction.

I have finally gotten around to updating the packages in our PPA for Ubuntu Natty. Users should be able to follow the instructions on the PPA page to install RabbitVCS and be kept up-to-date with the latest packages.

One disclaimer though: it’s not yet possible to run Ubuntu in Unity mode in a virtual machine, which means I have no way of testing RabbitVCS under Unity. I’ll still try my best to help users if they run into problems, but you need to be aware it’ll be very hard to troubleshoot for the time being.

Let me know if there are any problems with installation!

Things have calmed down somewhat since the v0.14.2.1 release and I’ve been wanting to post an update on my RabbitVCS-related goings on.  So what have I been up to?

Well, some of you may have heard about GNOME 3, which is scheduled to be released within a month or two. Unfortunately, the current versions of both nautilus-python and RabbitVCS are completely broken in GNOME 3 because PyGTK has not and will not be ported to GTK+3, and nautilus-python is what RabbitVCS uses to interface with the Nautilus extension framework.  The good news is that not only am I the maintainer for RabbitVCS, I’m the nautilus-python maintainer as well!  I’ve just about gotten the new bindings to work correctly on GNOME 3 and will put out a release as soon as possible.  They will require Nautilus 3 and the next bug-fix release of PyGObject 2.28 (I uncovered a bug in the current version).

The result of all of this is that I will need to port RabbitVCS’s Nautilus client to GTK+3, and possibly the rest of RabbitVCS as well.  It’s going to get a little hairy for a while as we figure out what to do.  So if anyone has any ideas, I’m all ears.

I’m also the maintainer of thunarx-python, which I started originally as a project on github.com, and I recently did my first release as an officially hosted Xfce project!  I just released v0.2.3 last weekend and the project is stable and ready to be packaged by distributions.

Once I get this nautilus-python release out the door, I will start focusing on RabbitVCS bugs once again and maybe make some more progress on advancing towards v0.15.

Happy St. Patricks Day!

Someone found a minor bug in the setup.py file for v0.14.2, so here is v0.14.2.1 which fixes that bug.

Homepage:
http://www.rabbitvcs.org

Download RabbitVCS v0.14.2.1 at:
http://wiki.rabbitvcs.org/wiki/download

Note: We will have new packages in our PPA presently.

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

Adam

Today we are releasing RabbitVCS v0.14.2, a bug fix release that should go a long way towards improving the experience for git users.  There are some treats for svn users as well, though.

• Bug #483. Protect from a key error if no message attribute is present in the log item.
• Fixed the git status to show untracked files as untracked, not normal
• Allow the git status checker to handle repositories in symbolically linked directories
• Bug #486. Fix locale/encoding issues with the date string coming in from git.
• Bug #502 Annotate no longer cuts off lines with closing parentheses in them (it’s a git command line response parsing issue)
• Fix the log context menu command that compares with the previous revision
• Bug #501, Check if the log revision items list is empty before trying to display it
• Bug #499, Don’t show the Working Copy revision in the changes revision selectors
• In the command line, expand specified paths to make it easier to detect working copies
• No more relying on hard-coded paths, now we can install to any arbitrary prefix

There are definitely more bug fixes to come in v0.14.3, but I wanted to get these out the door since my time to work on them is going to be diminished for a while.

Homepage:
http://www.rabbitvcs.org

Download RabbitVCS v0.14.2 at:
http://wiki.rabbitvcs.org/wiki/download

Note: We will have new packages in our PPA presently.

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

Adam

The release cycle for v0.14 ended up being quite long for a variety of reasons, and though I accomplished most of my goals for the release (adding git support, improving the nautilus extension), there is always more to do, more functionality to add and more bugs to fix.

Our next release

Since I started working on this project (2+ years now), there has been a subtle pattern to our releases.  v0.12 was a complete rewrite of the original framework along with a bunch of new functionality, and v0.13 added onto it, filling out the functionality and fixing bugs.  v0.14 was similar to v0.12 in that it pushed some boundaries by adding git support, and I think v0.15 should continue the pattern by filling out the existing functionality and not doing anything too ambitious.  I originally had planned on adding support for another VCS in v0.15, but instead it will be used as a stepping stone for v0.16.

With that said, here is roughly what I’d like to accomplish for v0.15 (subject to changes of course):

• Add a recursive/asynchronous status monitor to the Nautilus extension
• Add RabbitVCS menu items and emblems to the Gedit file browser plugin
• Convert all dialogs from glade to gtkbuilder
• Refactor VCS abstraction code to make it easier to add new VCSs and UIs

These may or may not get done for v0.15 but these are goals.

Looking for contributors

While I will continue working on RabbitVCS for the forseeable future, and I do get occasional help from Jason and Juan, it would be great if more people would contribute to the project, even if in small ways.  If you know python and can spare some time, check out our issue tracker and see if you can fix a bug or implement a feature request.  If you don’t know python but you know some other language, maybe you can work on a new client, like a Windows shell extension, a Mac Finder extension, a KDE extension, or a standalone application for accessing RabbitVCS functionality.  Or if you don’t want to do any programming, you can help keep the website/documentation up to date, manage our translations, or triage bug reports.  You can go as big or as little as you want with your contributions.  I look forward to hearing from you!

Adam

It looks like something strange happened with the v0.14.1 release tarball because it did not include the actual bug fixes, it was an exact copy of v0.14.  So none of the bugs I fixed were actually fixed in that release.  With that said, here is the “real” v0.14.1, but I’m calling it v0.14.1.1 so we know the difference.  I included a couple more bug fixes in this release, as well.

• (Bug #456) Fix nautilus crasher when dialogs are acted on
• (Bug #461) Fix a crasher in the merge dialog
• (Bug #457) In the changes dialog, fix bug that stopped diffs from being generated
• Also fixed an issue where opening versioned files from the changes dialog would not work sometimes.
• (Bug #477) Fix crasher in revision properties dialog when save button is clicked

Homepage:
http://www.rabbitvcs.org

Download RabbitVCS v0.14.1.1 at:
http://wiki.rabbitvcs.org/wiki/download

Note: We will have new packages in our PPA presently.

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

Adam

A few serious bugs were discovered shortly after the v0.14 release, including one very serious one that crashed nautilus when any kind of dialog was displayed or program was executed.  So here is a small bugfix release that fixes these issues.

• (Bug #456) Fix nautilus crasher when dialogs are acted on
• (Bug #461) Fix a crasher in the merge dialog
• (Bug #457) In the changes dialog, fix bug that stopped diffs from being generated
• Also fixed an issue where opening versioned files from the changes dialog would not work sometimes.

Homepage:
http://www.rabbitvcs.org

Download RabbitVCS v0.14.1 at:
http://wiki.rabbitvcs.org/wiki/download

Note: We will have new packages in our PPA presently.

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

Adam

Good news!  RabbitVCS v0.14 is out!

After almost a year of development (with some breaks), v0.14 is finally here.  This release brings about a ton of new functionality and bug fixes, most notably the addition of git support, which makes this our first release that is truly multi-vcs, a quicker status checker for the nautilus file manager extension, and an improved mechanism for resolving and editing conflicts.

Stay tuned for news regarding v0.15!

Homepage:
http://www.rabbitvcs.org

Download RabbitVCS v0.14 at:
http://wiki.rabbitvcs.org/wiki/download

Note: We will have new packages in our PPA within a couple days.

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

If you are reading this now, that means the migration was a success!  Prior to this month, the rabbitvcs.org domain and website was hosted by Bruce (a long lost but much missed developer for the project).  Since Bruce is no longer associated with RabbitVCS I decided the domain and website needed to be migrated to my own servers.  A few weeks ago we transferred domain name ownership but kept the website hosting the same.  But today, we have moved all of the website, including the blog and wiki, to a new server under my control.  Hopefully, everything was migrated successfully.  But if you find any weirdness or issues, just let us know and we’ll try to resolve the problem.