SVN Support in Bespin

A couple of weeks ago, I kicked off the addition of SVN support to Bespin (bug 493038). This required two things: One was the actual ability to choose which VCS you’re using, as it defaulted to Hg and the auto-detection was primitive and long since functional. (There were rumors that it had even been missing from the code for a while already.) But that was the relatively easy part, as it was mostly just manipulating HTML.

The (relatively) harder part was writing the code that would do the actual work with SVN. (VCS support in Bespin is powered by UVC.) A factor in this difficulty was that the backend code is written in Python, which I’m not especially familiar with. Nevertheless, the process was actually simplified by the way things are set up, because I was able to copy the Hg code and just modify to fit the SVN commands. I was able to add basic checkout, commit, and update support, as well as username/password authentication. Kevin later came in and finished up the push/commit differentiation, among other things. I believe SSH support still needs to be done, but we’re looking for a method to use to do it. (Kevin has suggested using environmental variables, as SVN does not have the ability to pass SSH details via command line, like Hg does.)

Kevin and the other Bespin folks are in the process of getting the 0.4.0 release out the door today or in the next couple of days, and that will include this support for SVN, as well as collaboration.

Real Tab Support in Bespin, Part 2

A couple of days ago, I blogged about trying to add real tab support into Bespin, and about the discussion going on about where that code should live. However, I can now report that, not only have I been successful in my endeavors (again, if you count my first attempt), I have been able to accomplish it solely within the Cursor Manager. This means that I have gone against what I had originally argued for, and I did it by simply starting over.

My first few attempts helped me get familiar with the code that controls the model, the cursor, and the editor. (MVC, as Ben referred to it. But no, not that MVC.) But attempting to switch between model-awareness and cursor-awareness just cluttered up my code and confused the heck out of me. So I saved everything I had in a little patch file, then reverted all my changes and began anew. (Having Ben first commit some basic cleanup stuff I came across certainly helped to clear things, too.)

So I approached the problem logically, with none of the conceptions from my prior attempts, other than my new-found familiarity with the code. This allowed me to focus on the one task that I had: keep everything in cursor. It also helped prevent me from having dozens of search windows up trying to figure out where things were. And, after a bit of minor confusion about object state persistence and object cloning (thanks, kdangoor!), it was done pretty quickly. But it does require that any position coordinates that are sent to the model be translated via the new getModelPosition().

Since Julian Viereck has been “messing around” with “my” code a lot lately, and since this darn task has taken up a good chunk of my day every day this past week and a half, I decided to put up my own public clone of the Bespin repository on BitBucket to keep things running smoothly. That way I can mess around with things, too, and not get in other people’s way (as much). My code for the tab support is available in this changeset, in addition to this attachment on the bug.

So go merge or import or whatever it is you do in Hg, and give my code a whirl. If you find anything amiss, don’t hesitate to let me know. I would imagine Ben will be critiquing my code at some point soon and then eventually getting it into the main source. Enjoy!

Real Tab Support in Bespin

Over the past week, I have been attempting to add real tab support to Bespin (bug 474055), under the guidance of Ben Galbraith (bgalbraith). Discussion on this issue has ensued in many places, including on Ben’s blog (in which he indirectly called me a weird hippie), as well as in at least two topics on the Google Group/mailing list Bespin Core.

The issue behind supporting real tabs is getting the editor to know that a tab is a variable width character. I was able to solve the problem of calculating just how wide that character is supposed to be, but that turned out to be the easy part. The problem that I’ve/we’ve been having is whether to contain all that knowledge in the cursor code (since it is essentially only a display issue) or to allow it to seep into the model code (which does all the actual text manipulation). That discussion is still ongoing right now, but either way, the change would require a little bit of refactoring of a lot of different functions, so that we can keep track of whether the function is getting the cursor position or the model position (as the latter is really just the nth index in the array, with all characters being equal).

So that’s where I’m at now. I’ve tagged the bug with the “student-project” keyword, since I’m a student and I’m working on the project, and I’ve posted a couple of patches in the bug to track my progress (the first one actually works, for the most part; the second one, not so much). All suggestions welcome.

Working on the Cloud

This is just a quick post to note that I have recently been working with the lovely folks in #bespin (including Dion Almaer [dalmaer]) and helping them out with some minor stuff. I’ve filed a few bugs (namely, bug 481486, bug 481511, and bug 478610) and fixed another (bug 478446). The first bug was a quick fix regarding logging in, and was pushed live to bespin.mozilla.com rather quickly in the form of version 0.1.5 (“Nonchalant Nimbus+”). The second bug was actually fixed by another bug, which also fixed a number of bugs I’d noticed and mentioned in the channel, but never officially filed. The third bug still exists, but is probably still over my head, as it requires removing the display of lines in the area where the scrollbars would/should be. And that fourth bug was a quick regular expression fix to add support for plus signs and underscores in the e-mail addresses used to register on a Bespin implementation. The second and fourth bugs are currently only fixed in trunk, and I don’t know what the plan is for pushing them live. The third bug has yet to be fixed.

I’ve also taken the liberty (with dalmaer’s blessing) of porting Bespin’s README.txt file to MozillaWiki as the starting point for the Developer Guide (which was mentioned in the User Guide as an upcoming document). Work still needs to be done to move any relevant content from the User Guide to the Developer Guide, but I’m heading to bed, because I’ve got a plane to catch for home tomorrow afternoon. (Your help in the matter would be greatly appreciated, though!)

I do want to note first, however, that throughout all this I’ve been implicitly testing QA build 2 of Firefox 3.1b3 (to be released next week), and everything seems tip-top at the moment (with 126 tabs open, no less!).