File history

[Peter Morgan <pm daffodil uk com>]

First I'd like to say hi to this mailing list.. and how nice Meld is to use... 

Name is Peter "mash" Morgan, Wales UK, 41 years olde am an EX windows programmer/user 
now Ubuntu :-) and learning/migrating some stuff from VB to pygtk/glade. 


This mailing is regarding bug http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=342701 - no history in drop downs.. 
Here are some observations on the issues

Stephen said  on the bugzilla >> 
The gui is mostly created in glade. See meldap.py:NewDocDialog and
filediff.py:FileDiff, dirdiff.py:DirDiff. They all use gnomeglade.py:Component
to do the actual widget construction.
<<
Been through these but a few questions ? sorry ..

Am In the NewDocDialog at the moments and can't quite see there the widgets "are created"
> > _map_widgets_into_lists( ("fileentry", "direntry", "vcentry", "three_way_compare", "tablabel"
? found the function and still confused ? 

Also the NewDocDialog does not have a history. It's also possible to enter None values - which doesn't crash meld ;-), but does give a warning.

The "File selectors" however in the Main compare Notebook area (dont know what to call this.. overview), they do maintain their history. However these don't allow the selection of directories, or indeed the direct entry of a directory path in the Entrybox which throws and error. The History of these selections is not persistent between sessions.

I also find the "File" tabs and the "Directory" tabs in the NewDocDialog frustrating, as more often that not I want to dive directory into Dir comparison 99.99% of the time.. but that's me ;-)

I also like the suggestion Harian Made
> >
A possible simplification - you could consolidate "file comparison" 
and "directory comparison" into one tab, just figure out if both filenames 
refer to directories or to comparable files and complain if they're 
incompatible references.  I know that you have such a check already, because in 
the "file comparison" context you won't allow selecting a directory as the 
final result, and in the "directory" context you won't allow selecting a non-
directory.
<<

So the thoughts/questions I have are ?

* it it worth combining the file/dir selection into a single widget ? ie if its a dir selected, its a DIR, a file = a file 

* Might a liststore be useful for keeping selections between windows and widgets ? part of append_dirdiff, append_filediff etc

* Should this liststore's contents be persistent between sessions, eg spooling out to XML ?

Have started playing with the code already.... 

regards

Pete