Re: browse verisons idea

[Andrew Beyer <beyer andrew gmail com>]

On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 3:46 PM, Steve Franks <bahamasfranks gmail com> wrote:
> Ok, I'm sure this has been suggested like 100 times, but wouldn't it
> be great when we have a file with multiple cvs revisions, we could
> expand it in the treeview to show the verisons as files in the
> directory that is the actual file on disk?
>
> That way, no changes need to me made the architecture that you
> highlight 2 files and click 'compare' to compare them against
> eachother, and it makes intuitive sense to the user, but we can get at
> old versions vs. eachother or the working copy?

I really don't think this functionality belongs in meld.

I would say it would be much better to push this down to the
filesystem or VFS layer, or to rely on the VC to deal with it. There
are already a number of FUSE and VFS plugins for various VC systems
that expose versioning as a directory structure and will work
naturally with any other tools. (provided they go through the VFS, if
necessary) Also, most VCs I've seen have support for external diff
tools, and will handle the details of this for you and just pass off
the paths of arbitrary revisions to diff to your tool of choice. The
latter option doesn't give you the navigability itself, but should
work with any GUI frontend to the VC system.

Is there something wrong with existing solutions, or something this
adds to what is out there already? It seems to me that this would be
potentially a lot of work, especially in the GUI to support it, that
would ultimately be duplicating functionality that already exists.