RabbitVCS

Another week, another beta release.  I swear, once I stop finding bugs just about every day we will do a final release.  In the meantime please accept this beta release which fixes some regressions introduced in beta 4 as well as more general bug fixes.

FYI, Jason is going to be on vacation for the next few weeks so we may not be able to update our Ubuntu/Debian PPA with new beta packages, as Jason normally handles this task.  I’m talking to him about possibly letting me do it, but I can’t guarantee anything.

Here are the details:

• Some dialogs, when closed, were not terminating their processes.  This should fix the rename dialog and the create dialog.
• Fix regression introduced in beta 4 where the checkout menu item and show log menu item were not present when they should be.
• Fix the git export dialog to be better integration with the main context menu
• Fix regression introduced in beta 4 where the gedit plugin ran really slow when opening new files.  It should be much much quicker now.
• Fix some issues with the git log dialog
• Run the git log and push dialogs as threaded so large working copies don’t block the ui.
• Fixed bug #441, Deleting from the commit window is fixed
• Fixed bug #440, After reloading the changed files table in the commit window, honor whether show unversioned files is toggled
• Make the height of the svn update-to-revision dialog flexible so it doesn’t cut into the widgets
• Icons will now appear next to menu items in the Thunar extension
• Fix the nautilus/thunar property page for git (Wasn’t working at all)
• Refactored the rabbitvcs status object somewhat to make it more consistent when using multiple vcs’s
• Fixed bug #443, Fix the stop-on-copy functionality for svn

Homepage:
http://www.rabbitvcs.org

Download RabbitVCS v0.14 beta 5 at:
http://wiki.rabbitvcs.org/wiki/download

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

Things are starting to get a little nuts with all these betas, but the addition of git and all that goes along with it is quite a big undertaking and the first couple of betas were pretty rough.  Things are definitely starting to smooth out, though.  This beta release focused mostly on bug fixes, but also contains another even bigger performance improvement for git status checking.  Here’s the list:

• Added a button to the notification dialog to allow users to save the messages to a file
• Fixed the “Initialize Repository” nautilus context menu to actually work
• Fixed a bug where files would be modified but the status was not getting updated in nautilus or gedit
• Added “Stage” and “Unstage” dialogs and context menu items.  These are similar to SVN’s Add dialog.  Basically, staging a file marks it as “added” and unstaging makes it “unversioned”.
• Fixed some misc bugs in the repo browser and changes dialogs
• Bug #395, In applypatch, if applying patch to a directory, don’t ask for the target directory
• Fixed regression in commit window, all unversioned files should not be checked by default
• Added the “Reset” context menu item to the log dialog
• Implemented a mechanism for canceling git commands (so the cancel button actually does something)
• The is_versioned method should use the local version of the status method, because it gets cached.  Quite good performance improvement for generating nautilus context menus
• Made huge git status call performance improvements.  The linux kernel git repo used to take 229 secs for me, now takes ~5-6 secs.
• Bug #384, In the branch dialog, convert the path to repository urls for both the to and from fields
• Allow exporting from a git repository even if the given path is not a git repo (requires passing –vcs=git)
• Bug #405, Format context menu labels to display underscores (for the ignore files list)
• Bug #348, Allow the repo browser columns to be sortable
• Bug #287, Add an emblem for unversioned files
• If the gvfs-trash (delete) call fails, just permanently delete the file

Homepage:
http://www.rabbitvcs.org

Download RabbitVCS v0.14 beta3 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

I’d like to gauge peoples’ interest in the various extensions and clients RabbitVCS provides as well as gauge interest in possible extensions/clients we might think about developing in the future.  Both polls allow for multiple answers (up to 2).  I’m interested in hearing comments as well, so don’t be afraid to leave some!

[poll id=”4″]

[poll id=”5″]

Nobody is allowed to sit on their laurels because four days after beta 2 we have beta 3!  Now with extra git goodness and more betaness than ever!

In this release, I put a lot of focus into improving status checker performance.  I also wanted to get the non-nautilus extensions up to date.  Here is a rough list of what changed:

• The git status checker performance is now much much faster.  Not quite instantaneous, but pretty good.
• Added a simple cache to the subversion status checker, similar to the one in the git status checker, and it should improve performance there as well.
• Added git menu items to the gedit extension, so you can access git from gedit now.
• Fixed a bug in the Thunar extension which was causing it not to load.
• Tweaked the nautilus/thunar context menu arrangement slightly
• Added the Merge menu item to the git context menu (not sure why I didn’t before)
• Fixed a bug in the git commit window where “removed” files were not showing up
• Imported translations from launchpad
• Improved the conflict decision dialog look a bit

All in all this is shaping up to be a pretty solid release.  I’m hoping that the next release will be v0.14 final, but we’ll have to see how things play out.

Homepage:
http://www.rabbitvcs.org

Download RabbitVCS v0.14 beta3 at:
http://wiki.rabbitvcs.org/wiki/download

Note: We should 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

Hi all, here is our second crack at a beta release for RabbitVCS v0.14. This release fixes a few bugs and actually adds some new functionality.

• Bug #428, Fix push dialog bug that stopped commits from showing up
• Bug #431, Show log message with newlines
• Bug #430, Show binary files in log affected files
• Updated rabbitvcs command line help message with new git modules
• Fix the remote repository lister function to be more flexible
• Fix the git update dialog error when the merge checkbox was active
• Add a new dialog for running Git Clean
• Add a new dialog for running Git Reset
• Bug #432, Check the version of the checker service. If the version changes, restart service.

Looks like beta2 is going to kick some butt, so go out and test it!

Homepage:
http://www.rabbitvcs.org

Download RabbitVCS v0.14 beta2 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

It has been a few days and so far about 27 users have downloaded the new v0.14 beta tarball from our project site, and I haven’t heard much back yet.  I was especially hoping to get feedback from people using the new git features, since they are the newest and most experimental.

If you haven’t downloaded and installed the beta yet, get it here. Ubuntu/Debian users can use our testing PPA.

Feel free to leave your feedback in the comments section.  I am happy to help users who need installation assistance.

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.

hi all, long time no see.  Some of you might have been wondering if RabbitVCS was dying or dead, and it isn’t, though truth be told it is limping a long a little.  Right now, Jason and I are the only ones actively writing code, and neither of us has much to time contribute to the project.  For myself, I used to work from home and could budget a certain amount of time during the day to working on RabbitVCS and other projects.  However, in late June of this year I got a “real” job with a “real” commute and all of a sudden my available time to work on side projects dropped over a cliff.  The good news is that about a month and a half ago I realized that on my bus trip to work in the morning (~25 minutes) I could get some programming work done.  So I purchased a netbook (Acer AIO 533), tethered it to my Android phone, and it has been a pretty successful idea.  I’ve been fitting in about 1.5 to 2 hours of side-programming per week this way, which is just enough to keep me happy.  I would love to be able to do more, and sometimes I’m able to, but this is good enough for now.

Aside from my personal update, here are the latest development updates to whet your appetites.  First of all, git support is coming along slowly but surely, and it will be available for v0.14.  Since git adds so many new concepts to the UI and to our code, we’re going to have a fairly long beta period where I hope people will be interested enough to try it out, suggest improvements, and maybe even be energized enough to get involved in some coding.  I can’t make any guarantees, but I think this might happen before Christmas.  The git support for v0.14 will be somewhat rudimentary, but it should allow you to do most of the things you need for git version control.

I also spent some time this past weekend and worked on making the RabbitVCS nautilus extension truly non-blocking, and I succeeded!  The trick of it is that while attaching the correct emblems to files has been non-blocking for a while, the parts of the extension that ask for context menu items has not been.  What this meant is that when you were loading a working copy, everything would be fine until you actually started clicking on stuff.  Once you did that, Nautilus would freeze for some amount of time until the menu was generated.  Unfortunately, until recently, there was no way around this due to limitations in the nautilus-python bindings.  I say “until recently” because in January of this year I took over development of the nautilus-python bindings and removed the limitation.  So with the release of nautilus-python 0.7.0 in May, we can finally populate context menus in a non-blocking way.  The catch is that this will only work if you have nautilus-python 0.7.0 or greater installed.  I just checked the package databases for Fedora and Ubuntu, and v0.7.0 is available for Fedora but not for Ubuntu (I just emailed the nautilus-python maintainer for Debian, so maybe it’ll be available in the next release).  However, we can probably set up 0.7 in a PPA for folks that want the newest shiny ;)

In summary, things are moving in the right direction, but just quite slowly.  There are definitely opportunities available for people who are willing to jump in and lend a hand (programming, packaging, whatever) so don’t be shy.

It’s that time again, time for another RabbitVCS point release!  RabbitVCS v0.13.3 brings to the table the following bug fixes:

Core:

• Bug #371, When double-clicking a Previous Message, only the most recent message would be returned
• Bug #375, Some VCS actions were not prepared to ask the user for authentication.  The result was an error.
• In the Repository Browser, double-clicking “..” does the correct thing again (goes to parent folder)
• Bug #371, Allow diffs of directories
• Bug #363, Prepend the file:// protocol to strings PySVN expects to be URLS
• Bug #331, Quote URLs when passing them to VCS functions
• Many other bug fixes

Nautilus Plugin:

• Bug #296, No longer forces the English language

Gedit Plugin:

• The v0.13.2.1 release broke the gedit plugin, but it is fixed again with this release.

Homepage:
http://www.rabbitvcs.org

Download RabbitVCS v0.13.3 at:
http://wiki.rabbitvcs.org/wiki/download

Note: Distribution packages and our PPA will be updated within a day or two.

Note2: Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) users should be aware that Intrepid has reached end-of-life status and our PPA packages will no longer build for it.

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

Apparently there were a lot of bugs in the v0.13.1 release because here is an unprecedented SECOND point release, fixing bugs like there is no tomorrow.  Most of the bugfixes are in the core app and not in the plugins.

Also, here is some more good news.  After several months of grueling back and forth, Juan (Nushio), our resident Fedora packager, has gotten RabbitVCS included in the official repositories, so starting pretty soon you Fedora users will be able to install RabbitVCS directly through the official repositories.

Here is a bugfix summary:

Core:

• Fixed some locale issues
• Fixed some minor issues for folks running python 2.4
• Small change to follow Fedora packaging guidelines, we’ll be in the Fedora repositories now!
• Bug #344, ‘Failure to rename because “The new name field is required”‘
• Bug #363, ‘Can’t use repo browser without a working copy: “. is not a working copy”‘
• In the Repository Browser, save urls when the user manually changes location
• When the Repository Browser is opened as a dialog, the “Close” button is renamed to “Select”.
• Bug #367, ‘Activating file in repository browser does not open, but thinks it’s a directory’
• Bug #361, ‘On Merge dialog leaving empty revision field cause hangup’
• Bug #360, ‘clear authentication information does not work’
• Backported a fix from trunk that allows one to double-click on a  message from the PreviousMessages dialog to select it.
• Bug #349, ‘Log top context menu: Re-enable update to revision feature’
• Bug #345, ‘Edit Property Value Doesn’t Fill Window Vertically’
• Bug #356, ‘Gradual accumulation of unterminated python subprocesses’  Note: This may not be 100% fixed, but we got at least one of the main causes
• Don’t show the Loading dialog twice when getting a diff from the log dialog
• All dialogs should have the rabbitvcs icon in the window

Nautilus Plugin:

• Fixed problem where the extension would still do all the status checking work even if both emblems and attributes (columns) were disabled.

Gedit Plugin:

• Bug #341, ‘Gedit plugin should be full menu rather than a part of “tools”‘
• Fixed some issues with older version of Gedit (r2425)
• Bug #325, ‘Make sure a window exists before updating it.’

Homepage:
http://www.rabbitvcs.org

Download RabbitVCS v0.13.2 at:
http://wiki.rabbitvcs.org/wiki/download

Note: Distribution packages and our PPA will be updated within a day or two.

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