custom diff/merge tools in qconfig are too complex to setup

Bug #416927 reported by Ian Clatworthy
6
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
QBzr
Confirmed
Medium
Unassigned

Bug Description

I find the UI for configuring an external diff or merge tool in qconfig
difficult to use and I'd like to fix it. What I'd prefer to see is:

* a combo box of commonly available tools (ala the Email clients)
* a text field showing the actual command.

The combo box could be editable so you could specify the name for a
custom tool if required. Changing the selection in the combo box would
change the text field value.

Both difftools and extmerge work a bit like this - they have mapping
tables from toolname -> command line for popular tools. It shouldn't be
too hard to reuse those I hope.

Tags: qconfig
Revision history for this message
Ian Clatworthy (ian-clatworthy) wrote :

One of the primary reasons this is bad is that Explorer's welcome page puts qconfig right at the front, immediately after a link to the help. So qconfig is the first experience many users will get of qbzr/Bazaar and many of those will have a GUI diff tool (say) that they already love. So making that hard to configure is not the user experience we want users to get as a first impression IMO.

Changed in qbzr:
importance: Undecided → Medium
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
John A Meinel (jameinel) wrote :

I'll also comment that if you go to configure an external diff program, it is easy to add the name of the executable as the first argument, and ignore the second argument.

And when you come back to the dialog the thing you just added has magically disappeared.

Probably adding a new one should really be a custom dialog, as it would make it clearer what was expected of the user. (Not to mention that you can then have a "Browse" button.)

tags: added: qconfig
Revision history for this message
Alexander Belchenko (bialix) wrote :

This bug marked as duplicate of meta-bug #489915, because there is needs to seriously improve our internal model.

If you disagree with duplicate status or want fix this problem separately, feel free to clear duplicate flag.

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