Re: [Monotone-devel] eclipse plugin progress report

[Jerome Fisher]

Georg-W. Koltermann wrote:

[...]

> But in practice, in my experience (being a Java programmer) class and
> package renames are rather rare as the product matures. I tend to rename
> often during the early experimental phase, but at that point I'm not
> concerned about history tracking of renames so much, I'm more concerned
> about the ability to go back a few revisions at that stage.  

I'm with Rob Shoening on this one - tracking renames triggered by
refactoring is one of the things that IDE-integrated version control is
especially useful for. It's nice to know that whenever you commit, your
changes will be properly reflected without manual fix-ups.

> Later on refactorings more often extract a part of a class into a new
> one to reduce complexity / increase modularity.  That cannot be easily
> modeled in monotone I believe.

Although this doesn't need special support from a monotone plugin,
Eclipse 3.2 can track refactoring history in a directory - suitable for
putting under version control - and create and apply "refactoring
scripts" from this history.

> Looking at practical day to day use, some other functionalities are more
> important to me are:
>
>     * navigating code history line by line (e.g. "annotate" view, if
>       possible with +/- buttons to scroll forward/backward in history
>       and annotate the next/previous version of the same file)
>           o color coding a la Emacs blame would be really nice :)

[...]

> Maybe I'm asking too much, dunno...  I once tried to colorize the
> annotation  support that the SVN Eclipse plugin provides, and felt
> completely lost. Eclipse is just such a complicated world to understand
> for a newcomer.  Feel free to share any nicely understandable
> introduction to that matter with me, I'd be glad if I at least understood

Eclipse 3.2 has a new "Quick diff annotation" feature. This puts little
rectangles in the ruler to the left of the editor, colour-coded by user
and revision. Hovering over the rectangle shows revision information and
the commit message. I'd love to see this supported by the monotone
plugin, though if Eclipse 3.2 isn't the target this may not be possible.

Regards,
Jerome