Subject: Re: FFmpeg considering GIT

From: "Shawn O. Pearce" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 May 2007 22:03:38 -0400

Paul Mackerras <[email-masked]> wrote:
> I have thought about rewriting it in a different language, but I
> haven't found anything that really appeals.  I don't want to go to
> C/GTK or C/Qt since that would make it hard to port to Windows and
> MacOS AFAIK.  Python/Tk would be a possibility, but I have never
> learnt python and I'm actually not all that comfortable with having to
> do things the object-oriented way.
> 
> Any suggestions?

Funny that you mention this.  Lately I have been hacking on git-gui,
trying to improve it and clean up some of the code.

I've thought about wxWindows but didn't really dig into it to see
how usuable it would be - primary reason is not everyone has it
installed on their system.  The same for GTK and Qt.  Actually I
don't even have GTK installed on my Mac but I did install Qt3
(took half a day!)  so I could build qgit at one point in time.

But almost everyone already has a wish installed.

I've thought about writing git-gui in C, but linking to the Tk
library for the "portable UI".  But not everyone has the Tcl/Tk
development headers and libraries installed, but they probably do
have the wish executable installed.

I want to limit the barrier to entry for git, and that means limiting
the barrier of entry for git-gui.  Keeping our requirements to a
minimum helps.

So I think I've settled on sticking to Tcl and its Tk extensions,
but making more use of newer Tcl constructs like namespaces.  If you
look at my `pu` branch of git-gui I have actually split the program
down into many files, and have started to organize the code in each
into different namespaces, depending on function.

-- 
Shawn.