[anjuta-devel] 3.10 cycle plans

[James Liggett <jrliggett cox net>]

Hi Everybody,
A little more than an hour ago I released Anjuta and anjuta-extras
3.8.0. Branches for 3.8 are also in place, so freeze is over now.

With another cycle behind us it's time to once again look to the future.
I haven't been doing much in the way of hacking these past few cycles
because I've been working on finishing out my college degree. I finally
finished in December and am now looking for a job (Yay!!) The upshot is
I hope to have much more hacking time this cycle as the job search has
been a bit slow, so I want to discuss what I'd like to do this cycle:

1. Use libgit2-glib in the git plugin. Nacho's libgit2 bindings appear
to be shaping up nicely; it looks like we can get most of the git plugin
onto libgit2 with them. But, it doesn't look like libgit2 has push and
pull over SSH, so we'll probably still have to use the command line for
those. Pretty much everything else looks good, though.

2. Improve usability in git shell. During freeze I did some
experimenting with different ways of exposing commands in git shell. The
early version of my work here is now in master. Amomg the changes:

- Pack the dock and the command bar together so there is only one Git
view in the dock layout.

- Add a toggle button to the Git dock grip that lets you hide and show
the command bar. The toggle's state is stored in GSettings so that it
persists across sessions.

- You can switch to a branch by double-clicking on it in the Branches pane.

- I have planned to, but have yet to implement, some context menus for
each view. These will let you do simple things without having to pull up
the command bar. I want to add items for things like checking out an
unstaging single files, or tagging, reverting, cherry picking, or
resetting revisions in the log viewer, among many other things. I want
to do this to help git shell get out of the way. Something I've noticed
is that to do certain things, like check out one file, you have to:

1) Show the command bar if it's hidden
2) Select the file you want to check out
3) Press the Check out button
4) Hit OK.

I looked at this an thought that it would be useful if I could just
right click on the file and check it out directly. The same could be
said of many different tasks in git shell.

3. Show diff output in the Status and Stash views. This was requested
ages ago but I just haven't had the time to do it until now. Once we
move over to libgit2 this should be pretty easy to do.

4. Bring some form of log filtering/search back. We had this in the old
git plugin, but like so many things it just fell by the wayside when git
shell landed.

5. Introduce some form of interactive adding. This will allow you to add
parts of changes to a file (i.e. diff hunks) to the index instead of
whole files. This feature would be useful if you've done several changes
to a file that should really be separate commits.

Yes, this is a very ambitious list. With the college monkey off my back
I think we can get at least items 1, 2, and 3 done this cycle.

If you have any plans for the new cycle feel free to post them to this
thread. Here's to a great Anjuta 3.10!

Thanks,
James