Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: arch and linux 2.7

[Tom Lord]

    > From: John Goerzen <address@hidden>

    > > Also some more effort should be put into decent GUI tools (yeah, i`m
    > > promoting myself here too, not on purpose as well :-)
    > > So far it didn`t seem there is any observable interest to work on that.

    > That may be because there isn't a lot of interest in that :-)

    > Dunno... personally I've never been interested in any GUI tools,
    > though editor integration is nice.

I'm generally an anti-GUI-IDE bigot -- you have to have a _really_
good reason in my view to want a GUI for some programming tool.

For at least some users, arch provides some really good reasons to
want GUIs.   In particular, I wind up wishing I had one whenever I go
on a merge fest.

During a merge fest, I have a list of changes that people have
submitted by pointing me at their arch archives.   For each change, 
I like to update my mirrors, review the change, try out a merge,
review the change after the merge, run some tests, merge for real,
review and test the real merge, commit (sometimes in a complicated way
like prism-merging), move to the next change.

Lots of steps there and many of them require me typing or
cutting-and-pasting an archive name, version name, revision name --
many of them require just routine project-tree-slinging......

There's a lot of mundane bookkeeping there.

A big win of GUIs is that they can substitute "active recollection"
into "passive recollection".  For example, instead of remembering (or
looking up) an archive name to feed to a tla command, with a GUI, I
can just pick it off a menu or link.

Overall, my (vaguely conceived, at this point) ideal arch GUI would be
a kind of "arch secretary" for me, keeping track of lots of names and
project trees, letting me fire off pretty boilerplate operations in
terms of those.

-t