[ANNOUNCE] Push Me Pull You 0.2 - Tech Preview Release

[ANNOUNCE] Push Me Pull You 0.2 - Tech Preview Release

[Mark Williamson]

Hi all,

I'd like to announce a new release of the Push Me Pull You (pmpu) tool; a GUI 
for distributed revision control systems.

PMPU supports plain hg, hg forest repositories, bzr, git and darcs as 
underlying repositories.  It aims to provide a powerful graphical interface 
to the underlying functionality, based around the workflow of incoming and 
outgoing changesets.

PMPU is implemented in Python and PyQt4 and is tested on Linux, though it 
should work on other Unix platforms.  I eventually hope to support Windows 
hosts also.  For hg, bzr and git, plugins are supplied to improve integration 
with the command line interface of the underlying system.

My DVCS of choice is Mercurial but I aim to properly support the other 
backends and have this be an SCM-agnostic system.  I would appreciate expert 
feedback about my implementation of all the backends including Mercurial, 
including advice if I'm doing things wrong and suggestions of further 
enhancements.

Please treat this as experimental software, released as a technical preview.  
The error handling is not very good and my understanding of the underlying 
SCMs is still somewhat incomplete.  I regard it as fairly safe and solid and 
it hasn't eaten my data during all my use and testing but please be cautious 
nonetheless.  I don't want to make it sound like it's going to destroy the 
world ;-) but I'm very aware that most users of revision control have 
critical data to manage.

The website is here: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~maw48/pmpu/ and contains links 
to a downloadable tarball and the Mercurial repository.

Please feel free to send me e-mail with feedback or questions, no matter how 
insignificant.  There's no user documentation, so don't hesitate to ask me 
questions about how things work.  Private e-mail is fine if you prefer.

Cheers,
Mark
-- 
Push Me Pull You - Distributed SCM tool (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/pmpu/)

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Push Me Pull You 0.2 - Tech Preview Release

[Junio C Hamano]

Mark Williamson <mark.williamson@cl.cam.ac.uk> writes:

> I'd like to announce a new release of the Push Me Pull You (pmpu) tool; a GUI 
> for distributed revision control systems.
>
> PMPU supports plain hg, hg forest repositories, bzr, git and darcs as 
> underlying repositories.  It aims to provide a powerful graphical interface 
> to the underlying functionality, based around the workflow of incoming and 
> outgoing changesets.

I haven't tried to look at this since your 0.1 announcement
(which unfortunately was accepted with a thundering silence
here), but it would be interesting if it allowed to pull from Hg
into git (or other combinations).  Is that one of the features
(or planned features)?

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Push Me Pull You 0.2 - Tech Preview Release

[Mark Williamson]

> > I'd like to announce a new release of the Push Me Pull You (pmpu) tool; a
> > GUI for distributed revision control systems.
> >
> > PMPU supports plain hg, hg forest repositories, bzr, git and darcs as
> > underlying repositories.  It aims to provide a powerful graphical
> > interface to the underlying functionality, based around the workflow of
> > incoming and outgoing changesets.
>
> I haven't tried to look at this since your 0.1 announcement
> (which unfortunately was accepted with a thundering silence
> here),

Heheh, yeah, I was almost deafened by it :-)  But it's a new obscure tool, 
written using an foreign SCM so I'm not surprised if uptake is slow!

> but it would be interesting if it allowed to pull from Hg 
> into git (or other combinations).  Is that one of the features
> (or planned features)?

That's not one of the current features; I've been focusing on making basic 
functionality of each of the backend available from the GUI.  I'm trying to 
do this in a standardised way so that the GUI always looks / acts the same 
regardless of underlying storage repository.

But yes, in the future I'd like to wrap the process of repository conversion / 
interaction so that's it's easier for people on different SCM backends to 
collaborate.  I've been pondering whether a commandline-based "universal SCM 
tool" that could transparently provide DVCS functionality on top of a variety 
of systems would be worth playing with at some point.

Cheers,
Mark

-- 
Push Me Pull You - Distributed SCM tool (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~maw48/pmpu/)

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Push Me Pull You 0.2 - Tech Preview Release

[Martin Langhoff]

On Jan 17, 2008 12:15 PM, Mark Williamson <mark.williamson@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> Heheh, yeah, I was almost deafened by it :-)  But it's a new obscure tool,
> written using an foreign SCM so I'm not surprised if uptake is slow!

I don't mind at all that it is hosted with Hg ;-) I just looked at the
screenshots and description, and my feedback, as potential user, is
that it isn't clear what I would use it for.

 - What's the usage scenario for a cli-oriented power user? I do use
hg on other projects, but I'm happy to use its commandline tools.

 - For a GUI user, how does it compare with using git gui when using
git, and the equivalente gui when using hg?

cheers,


martin

Re: [ANNOUNCE] Push Me Pull You 0.2 - Tech Preview Release

[Mark Williamson]

> > Heheh, yeah, I was almost deafened by it :-)  But it's a new obscure
> > tool, written using an foreign SCM so I'm not surprised if uptake is
> > slow!
>
> I don't mind at all that it is hosted with Hg ;-) 

Incidentally, I didn't mean to imply that that was the only reason nobody 
responded.  But it's always a pain to think you have to get another SCM 
installed to get the latest source.  I put tarballs up for releases and 
occasional snapshots but I should probably enabled tarball download from the 
web interface...

> > I just looked at the  
> screenshots and description, and my feedback, as potential user, is
> that it isn't clear what I would use it for.

Well, that's fair enough :-)

>  - What's the usage scenario for a cli-oriented power user? I do use
> hg on other projects, but I'm happy to use its commandline tools.

As you rightly point out, there's not anything you can do with pmpu that you 
couldn't have managed on the CLI, the basic functionality is the same.  So 
nothing that compelling (yet).

I find the GUI is sometimes quicker to use, e.g. creating and e-mailing 
bundles.  I find that keeping a pmpu window open somewhere gives me handy 
feedback on what incoming / outgoing changes need dealing with.  The new 
annotate view provides live filtering, flexible viewing of metadata for each 
line in the file, etc.  That's going to be handy too, although it needs more 
work.

But again, you *can* do all that stuff on the commandline and for some people 
that's probably best.

You will notice, however, that I have included a CLI in the GUI.  Right now 
it's not that useful because it doesn't let you have any output ;-)  What I'd 
like to do is to integrate this more with the rest of the GUI in the style of 
the Hotwire shell (http://code.google.com/p/hotwire-shell/), e.g. intelligent 
completion, higher level interface to what you're trying to do, etc.  The 
power of the CLI interface plus the power of a flexible GUI to organise your 
thoughts.

>  - For a GUI user, how does it compare with using git gui when using
> git, and the equivalente gui when using hg?

The main advantage relative to those tools is probably that it supports a 
range of SCM backends and gives them a rather uniform user interface.  I'd 
say it's also a fairly simple interface to get started with, although I'm 
hardly a usability guru.  It's currently more limited than, say, git-gui 
because I've not yet added all the features I want.

My intention is to provide an alternative style of GUI to the existing tools, 
which may suit some people better.  Right now the main UI difference is the 
focus primarily on incoming / ougoing changeset flow.  I've got other ideas 
I'll be trying out in due course ;-)

Given the similarities of all the modern DVCS systems I think a sensible 
approach is to have a range of polished GUI tools, which can use a range of 
DVCS backends.  The trend towards this is already starting and I guess I'd 
like pmpu to one day be one of these ;-)

Cheers,
Mark

-- 
Push Me Pull You - Distributed SCM tool (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~maw48/pmpu/)