Bazaar and Java IDEs (was Bazaar and Visual Studio)

[Philippe Lhoste]

On 15/09/2010 03:20, Max Bowsher wrote:
> I personally am quite a light user of IDE integration (I habitually
> commit from the command line).

Me too.
At work, we use Eclipse and have Perforce as VCS.
Historically, I used the Perforce (P4) GUI, which was quite good and improved quickly 
(using Qt too).
Some colleagues (mostly those having a Linux box) just prefer to use the command line...

Finally, I installed the Perforce plugin for Eclipse.
But at the end, I often fall back on the GUI... I just use the plugin so it checks out the 
files for me when I start to edit them (P4 makes the versioned files read-only and makes 
them writable when they are checked out).
To see the currently checked out files, the history of changelists, make diffs, submit the 
changelists and so on, I just use the native GUI.

It is the same with Bazaar, and even if I appreciate Bzr-explorer, I find myself using 
mostly the command line to have status, add files, commit, etc.

> However, the things that I really miss
> the most are in-IDE indication of locally modified files. Tie-in to move
> files in bzr when they are moved by the IDE refactoring is also a must.
> I suspect at least some of my co-workers would demand in-IDE diff and
> commit as a minimum.

The move thing is what I miss the most: having to fall back on the command line and issue 
commands with long paths is quite annoying.
But even if I work mostly with Windows, I adhere to the Unix philosophy of avoiding 
massive tools (except Emacs, perhaps?) having everything and the kitchen sink, and mixing 
together small tools that I have hand-picked because I appreciate them.
I nearly never used the diff in Eclipse (not even sure how to do it!).

That said, I presented my philosophy, which seems shared by a number of developers, 
although probably more Unix developers than Windows ones...
I totally understand the need for integration (a bit less those rejecting a tool only 
because it doesn't offer such integration).
But as said in this thread, maintaining such plugin is probably not the task of the core 
programmers (most of them without a Windows box, I bet!) but most likely of volunteers, 
having VS (and probably only the paid version), Python knowledge, know-how of Bazaar and 
VS plugin mechanism, and some free time. Probably a mix not so common, I fear.

-- 
Philippe Lhoste
--  (near) Paris -- France
--  http://Phi.Lho.free.fr
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