1 = Eclipse Plugin Wishlist =
3 Now that we have some basic features in the Eclipse plugin, we need
4 to focus on making it usable by average users doing daily tasks.
8 Commit all (or selected) files to current branch.
10 This feature is trivial if the repository is fully mounted within
11 Eclipse, as Eclipse has the entire working tree available, making
12 it easy to write out the blobs and tree objects needed to form the
13 root tree for the new commit.
15 Its less easy when the repository is not fully mounted within
16 Eclipse. (See for example the egit repository itself; the
17 repository has 3 projects in it so Eclipse doesn't see the top
18 level directory.) In this case egit needs to preseve the files
19 that are currently either in HEAD or in the index for the parts
20 of the tree it cannot see, while using the files it has in memory
21 for the parts of the tree that it can see. In this latter case I'm
22 thinking that preserving HEAD rather than the index is the right way
23 to go here, as jgit does not play nicely with core Git's index file.
24 Consequently users should be discouraged from trying to create a
25 commit based on the results of both tools.
29 Create a new branch from any revision specification.
37 Switch to an existing branch, updating the working directory to match.
39 Note that updating the working directory may require a 3 way merge
40 if the working directory is dirty (git checkout -m).
42 My usual git working style is to not switch branches with a dirty
43 working directory; I always commit to the current branch before
44 switching to a new one. I mention that because I assume it'll be
45 easier to implement that workflow first; once you have commit
46 capability, you can do that style of branch switching (either
47 preventing the switch or doing an implicit commit when the working
48 directory is dirty) without having to worry about merging. ''--
53 Fetching changes from a remote repository into a tracking branch.
56 I'd like to keep egit/jgit 100% pure Java, to make it easier to
57 install the plugin on a wide varity of systems. This means we
58 need to implement a good amount of code for the network protocol
59 and the --objects-edge feature of rev-list. Although a lot to code
60 its probably only slightly more effort than forking out to run git
61 fetch and deal with its error conditions.
63 Fetching over SSH should be possible through the jsch library
64 included in Eclipse; this is what CVS uses for its SSH2 connections.
65 Fetching from a local directory should just be a matter of creating a
66 Repository object on that directory path (no need to fork a process
69 Initially I'd like to stay away from the commit walkers (e.g. HTTP).
70 Actually supporting them is likely a really good argument for at
71 least making it possible for the user to configure jgit to invoke
72 "git fetch" in an external process.
76 Merging changes from one local branch to another.
78 Again, like fetch I'd like to keep egit/jgit 100% pure Java and
79 implement merge-recursive in Java. We may need to invoke RCS
80 merge if Eclipse doesn't have its own 3 way file merge algorithm
81 available, or do what core Git just did and implement a 3 way in
82 memory merge algorithm. git-merge-recursive is only 1336 lines of C
83 so it should not be too difficult to port the algorithm to pure Java.
87 Pushing changes to a remote repository.
89 A lot like fetch, we should be able to support the native Git
90 protocol for SSH based push, and for local directory access we just
91 need to mount the other repository as a new Repository object and
92 copy the object data from one to the other. Probably easier than
95 As far as packing data over the network goes I don't want to
96 implement the binary delta algorithm in pure Java right now. So this
97 means we would send packs containing only whole objects (no deltas).
98 This shouldn't really be an issue for the receiving end, except
99 that we will have a slightly higher network transfer cost coming
100 from egit than if core Git was used to push the same set of objects.
102 == Graphical History Viewer ==
104 A graphical history viewer similar to gitk or qgit, but in SWT/JFace
105 so it can run within the Eclipse workbench.
107 == SVN Integration ==
109 It would be swell -- but put it at the bottom of your priority list
110 -- to have git-svn interoperability; sadly most of my git usage at
111 the moment is in cloned svn repositories and it would be great if
112 egit could do the right thing when the current git repo is cloned
113 from svn. What "the right thing" is, exactly, is debatable, but I
114 suppose some kind of integration with the Subclipse plugin is one
115 possibility (and if nothing else, that plugin probably has code
116 that can be reused.) I'd like to be able to update from and commit
117 to the parent svn repository. ''-- Steven Grimm''
119 I'm considering this to be out of scope for the time being, but if
120 someone takes it on and submits reasonable patches we'll include
121 them. ''-- Shawn Pearce''