[Monotone-devel] Beta testing new ViewMTN

[Grahame Bowland]

Hey all

I've been working for some time on a rewrite of ViewMTN. It's now
mostly feature complete when compared to the old version, so it'd be
wonderful if some people would beta test it.

You can grab pull it from off.net, branch "net.angrygoats.viewmtn".
You should be able to run it standlone as "./viewmtn.py", and then go
to http://localhost:8080/ in a web browser to use it. web.py
(http://webpy.org/) is the framework used, so ViewMTN now supports
standalone use as well as WSGI (supported by Apache, lighttpd, etc.)
No more running Apache on a laptop just to use viewmtn!

Dependencies are:
 - a monotone from a child revision of [62961c1dc..] (this is post 0.30)
 - Python 2.4
 - Cheetah templates for python (in most distributions)
 - "highlight"  (http://andre-simon.de/)
 - shared-mime-info (available from your distribution or freedesktop.org)

You don't need any Gtk/Gnome libraries, ViewMTN includes an
implementation of the shared-mime-info spec. You just need the
shared-mime-info package installed, which should give you a
/usr/share/mime/ directory. If you're installing in a different
location, make sure to export XDG_DATA_DIRS. ViewMTN now uses this
large and fairly accurate database to guess mime type information for
files stored in mtn.

New viewmtn should be vastly faster, and have much lesser memory
requirements. It should also be much easier to change the look of a
site running ViewMTN, as the code is decoupled from the UI; see the
"templates/" subdirectory. It should also be possible to translate
ViewMTN, although some work is still needed to make that a reality.

The only obvious missing feature is icon display in the file browser;
I'm working on an implementation of freedesktop's icon specification
which should be ready this weekend. I'm also missing testers, so
please give it a go and let me your results. If you get the new
ViewMTN going under a web server, please send me the configuration you
used so I can add it as an example in the documentation.

Cheers
Grahame