One of the reasons blogging has been quiet the past week or so is I've been fiddling about with some coding.
I've been trying out wxPython and using it as an interface to a distributed source control system. It's purely experimental, but it did show me some deficiencies and strengths in some of the ones available.
Here is what I learnt though... wxPython is a great way of hacking together a coherent UI fast, I am still relatively inexperienced in Python and wxPython but the resources out there on the Internet are very useful.
As for the source control systems... First I tried out Mercurial, but I am really struggling with the API and trying to write extensions. This is mainly due to the lack of documentation, and a lot of current tools like Qct simply parse the commandline. I did work out some of the parts of the API to wrap, but I found it hard going with limited Python knowledge and a lack of comments.
The other system I tried was Bazaar which I found a very different experience. The API is excellently documented and the plug-in API is excellent. Admittedly the criticism levelled at this source contrl system is the speed, but it gets so much right. It is built on a solid foundation of correctness and the barrier for entry is lowered thanks to the excellent documentation. I managed o get a working status dialog up and running in a very short period of time (although admittedly I got sidetracked afterwards fiddling around with wxPython).
One of the reasons I was using wxPython is that it looks native on my Macbook Pro as a lot of the available UIs are GTK based meaning they look pretty bad on OS X. Also I wanted to try it out on Windows which meant it looked pretty good on that platform as well.
Hopefully I can find the time to tidy some of this code up into a reusable form and actually see something like at least the status and commit dialogs through to completion.
