Nautilus-SVN

[Chris Campbell <chris rockpaper ca>]

Hi All,

I had the idea to write a Nautilus component more or less mirroring what
the TortoiseSVN (and ToroiseCVS) do for Windows Explorer.

In case you're not familiar with these open source projects, here are
the relevant links:

  TortoiseSVN - http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/

  TortoiseCVS - http://www.tortoisecvs.org/

They are "shell extensions" for Windows Explorer that provide some
version control capabilities -- such as the ability to add and remove
files from version control, to update and commit changes, etc. -- using
Subversion and CVS, respectively, for the version control.

What I envision is basically an extension to the functionality provided
by the FMListView component.  In addition to the standard [ File name,
Size, Type, Date Modified ] columns there would also be some
Subversion-related columns:  [ SVN Status, SVN Revision, ... ]  There
would also be some context-menu items for adding/updating/committing
files, etc.

I'm writing to this list to get people's thoughts on this idea and also
some suggestions for how to approach it from a programming perspective. 
I'm a competent programmer but have no GNOME programming experience. 
I've read Alexander Larsson's document "Nautilus - Inside the shell"
which I found here:

http://developer.gnome.org/doc/whitepapers/nautilus/nautilus-internals.pdf

>From that document I gleaned that I probably want to write a new
NautilusView.  The document mentions that this is quite a lot of work,
however, and I'm hoping that subclassing FMListView will save me some
time.  (I will want to retain most of the FMListView functionality
anyway, I think.)

Please let me know your thoughts.

Thanks,
--Chris