There are two main views in mcvs.tcl.
The first is on the left side of the application, which is the tree-based
Directory View. The second is on the right side of the application,
which is the File View. Additionally, there is a Toolbar towards
the top of the window and there is also an Output Window in the bottom
right of the window. Also, there are a number of dialogs that support
operations such as checking out files, importing and exporting files and
expert mode.
It is important to note, when a directory
is selected in the Directory View, all Toolbar and menu actions affect
that directory. The active directory or file is indicated by a change
in the title of the window.
 Directory
View |
|
Selecting an item in the Directory View
will make that item the operand of all CVS commands. This will also
show the files in the selected directory in the File View. If this
directory has a CVS directory in it, mcvs.tcl will attempt to contact the
appropriate CVS repository and, if successful, will show the CVS status
of all the files in the selected directory.
A context menu can be posted if a directory
is selected with the right mouse button. This allows direct access
to actions also available in the main menu and the Toolbar.
The repository location entry dialog above
the directory view is read-only. It just gives feedback about the
repository from which the files currently being browsed are from.
| File
View |
|
Selecting an item in the File View will
make that item the operand of all CVS commands.
A context menu can be posted if an item
is selected with the right mouse button. If an item is under revision
control, an appropriate set of operations is available in the context menu.
If the item is not being managed by the revision control system, the only
operation available under the context menu will be for adding the file
to CVS.
The File View is displayed in a multi-column
listview. The operation of this listview should be relatively
familiar. For instance, columns can be resized and the list can be
sorted (and reverse sorted) by clicking on any of the columns (clicking
again will reverse sort).
| Smart
Status |
|
Under normal operation, mcvs.tcl only shows
the files from a single directory in the File View. This is handy,
but there is a better way. By using the context menu in the Directory
View, you can select "smart status". Smart status essentially invokes
"cvs -n up" which is a dry run at an update. mcvs.tcl parses the
output of this command and displays it like any other directory full of
files in the File View. The difference from a normal file list is
that "smart status" actually displays all files in the directory tree rooted
from the directory you invoked "smart status". Also, "smart status"
does not show you up-to-date files... so the signal-to-noise ratio goes
way down.
| Checkout
Dialog |
|
This dialog will allow you to check out
any modules available from a repositories modules file.
You can change the repository to be queried
in the entry at the top of the dialog. Then, click the query button
to find out what modules are available from the server. Note, if
you are using ssh, pserver or other external client/server mechanisms for
CVS that you must properly specify the repository location with this info.
The Checkout Dialog will allow multiple
selections of modules.
If you want to check out a module not listed
in the modules file, turn on expert mode in mcvs.tcl before invoking the
Checkout Dialog. Then, select anything in the list of available modules
and hit the ok button. The expert mode dialog will appear and you
can then explicitly specify the module or modules to check out. This
is admittedly a very lame way to go about doing this.
| Binary
Files |
|
Using
binary files with CVS is sometimes a pain. It is even more troublesome
when dealing with client/server CVS where the cvswrappers is actually ignored.
In order to simplify these issues, mcvs.tcl keeps track of what file types
should be treated as binary and automatically tags those files appropriately
when importing and adding files. For the most part, you won't need
to do anything to enjoy this feature, except for using a version CVS >=
1.10.
If you need to customize the files that
mcvs.tcl treats as binary, you can create a config
file in your home directory to control and augment it's behavior.
| Import/Export
Dialog |
|
These dialogs will allow you to import
and export files from a CVS repository. You should be very familiar
with the operation of these commands before using these dialogs.
Consult your CVS documentation before you go screwing up your repository.
| Expert
Mode |
|
Because mcvs.tcl makes the use of CVS a
little more user-friendly, some functionality is of course lost for the
power user. Thus, expert mode was born.
To invoke expert mode, select expert mode
in the admin menu in the main window. Selecting it again will turn
off expert mode.
When expert mode is on, every CVS command
to be executed will first be shown in a dialog which will allow the command
to be edited by hand before it is actually sent to the CVS repository.
If expert mode is not your thing, and you
occasionally want to just type a cvs command from scratch, use the menu
entry "admin->cvs command line". This will allow you to type an arbitrary
cvs command. It will use the currently selected directory in the
Main Window as the current working directory for the command.
| Config
File |
|
mcvs.tcl
can be configured with the use of a $HOME/mcvscfg.tcl script file.
This is a plain text file interpreted as Tcl code. The configuration
parameters include:
| binFilter |
A list of glob patterns to be used to
decide if a file is binary. This is used for both the CVS import
and add commands.
Append to this list to add to the globs,
or set it to cancel out its default setting. Look at the mcvs.tcl
script to see the default value. |
|
|
| Theme
Support |
|
mcvs.tcl uses pvimgs.tcl
to change the theme used by the app.
