The final version of guitone will probably take a little longer, since I want to synchronize this release with the release of 0.99 / 1.0 of monotone, so stay tuned. Other development continues in the meantime, I’m currently working on including support to query remote databases from guitone, which will likely make it into guitone 1.1.

But yes, there was one task which was yet missing there – one to automatically create a Win32 installer. The steps to produce that had been so far:

1. enter the to-be-packaged version in the InnoSetup script file
2. convert the supplied text files from Unix to DOS line endings, while giving them a .txt extension
3. call the InnoSetup compiler on the script file and create the executable

Especially the first and second action looked hard to automate, given the fact that Windows does not come with a rich set of tools to process text streams – and requiring a Cygwin installation just for using sed seemed awkward to me. Obviously other people had similar problems before and somebody proposed to emulate sed with a VBScript which would be executed by the Windows Scripting Host (WSH). Wow, cool thing – if I’d just remember my broken Visual Basic knowledge. But didn’t Microsoft have this Javascript Look-a-Like, JScript? Shouldn’t this be executable as well?

Apparently it was and I sat down to hack an improved JScript sed version:

var patterns  = new Array();
var replacements = new Array();
var argcount = 0;

for (var i=0; i<WScript.Arguments.length; ++i)
{
    pat = WScript.Arguments(i).split("/");
    if (pat.length != 4)
        continue;

    patterns[argcount] = new RegExp(pat[1]);
    replacements[argcount] = pat[2];  
    ++argcount;
}

while (!WScript.StdIn.AtEndOfStream)
{
    var line = WScript.StdIn.ReadLine();
    for (var i=0; i<argcount; ++i)
    {
        line = line.replace(patterns[i], replacements[i]);
    }
    WScript.Echo(line);
}

Now the only thing what was left was to fiddle around with the WSH command line tool cscript and to combine everything for a proper QMake target. Here we go:

DOCFILES="NEWS README README.driver COPYING"
...
win32 {
    isEmpty(QTDIR):QTDIR           = "c:\Qt\4.6.2"
    isEmpty(MINGWDIR):MINGWDIR     = "c:\MinGW"
    isEmpty(OPENSSLDIR):OPENSSLDIR = "c:\OpenSSL"
    isEmpty(ISCC):ISCC = "c:\Program Files\Inno Setup 5\ISCC.exe"
    
    win32setup.depends  = make_first
    win32setup.target   = win32setup
    win32setup.commands = \
        cscript //NoLogo res\win32\sed.js \
            s/@@VERSION@@/$${VERSION}/ \
            s/@@QTDIR@@/$${QTDIR}/ \
            s/@@MINGWDIR@@/$${MINGWDIR}/ \
            s/@@OPENSSLDIR@@/$${OPENSSLDIR}/ \
            < res\win32\guitone.iss.in > res\win32\guitone.iss && \
        ( for %%f in ($$DOCFILES) do \
            cscript //NoLogo res\win32\sed.js \
                s/\n\$$/\r\n/ \
                < %%f > %%f.txt ) && \
        \"$$ISCC\" res\win32\guitone.iss && \
        ( for %%f IN ($$DOCFILES) do del %%f.txt )
    
    QMAKE_EXTRA_TARGETS += win32setup
}

So if you know enough Javascript you can probably emulate whatever tool you're missing on Win32 without having to depend on any external dependency. Very cool!

The Tarball and a Mac OS X disk image can already be downloaded at the usual location, the Windows installer will follow shortly. [Update: The Windows installer has been added.]

As always, please report bugs if possible. And while guitone now comes with one new translation, Portuguese, thanks to Américo Monteiro, I’m still looking for more translators – if you’re interested, drop me a note!

While debugging the issue I hooked into QApplication::notify(QObject *, QEvent *) and noted that a QCloseEvent was send to my application… wait, what? A QCloseEvent? Yes, I also thought that these kinds of events would only be send to widgets, namely, top level widgets, but I got one for my application, and Qt plainly ignored it. So I went further ahead and tried to quit the application directly when the event occured, similar to this

bool MyApp::event(QEvent * ev)
{
    bool eaten = false;
    switch (ev->type())
    {
        // other stuff ...
#ifdef Q_WS_MAC:
        case QEvent::Close:
        {
            quit();
            eaten = true;
        }
#endif
        default:
            eaten = QCoreApplication::event(ev);
            break;
    }
    return eaten;
}

The complete list of changes is as always listed in NEWS. A Mac OS X binary is also already available, a package for Windows will follow tomorrow.

I’m still looking for translators – if you’re interested, please drop me a note.

The complete list of changes is written down in the NEWS file as always. I’ll try and prepare a Windows binary tomorrow, a binary for Mac OS X should arrive shortly as well.

Outstanding news of this release:

• Synchronization with other monotone nodes is no possible
• Workspace action implementation almost feature-complete (add, drop, revert, rename, ignore, unignore and update finally work)
• guitone can now create new monotone databases and setup new projects
• Much improved key management with the ability to change the passphrase of keys, filter the key output and also drop keys
• Many more bugfixes and smaller improvements as well as stabilization of the codebase

For a complete list of changes please check the NEWS file. I’ll try and prepare a Windows binary in the next couple of days, but probably won’t get to that before Wednesday, so if you want to help out, drop me a note. A binary for Mac OS X should arrive shortly as well.

Now the upcoming monotone release includes another long-awaited feature which is in the trunk as of yesterday: being able to query database contents from remote monotone servers. This is particularily useful if you want to check what branches are available server-side before you fetch them all. I’ve teamed up with Timothy and made a “single-shot” version of his new automate remote_stdio command which can be used as follows:

 # this picks your default netsync server stored in the database
 $ mtn au remote branches
 # ... alternatively, give it an optional hostname
 $ mtn au remote --remote-stdio-host myserver.org branches

function get_remote_automate_permitted(key_identity, command, options)

Now what has all this to do with guitone?

Especially the changes in 0.45 forced me already to pick my old pet project up again, because key-related commands changed their output in an incompatible manner and therefor my code needed to adapt to that as well. I’m also planning to finalize other features in the upcoming weeks, amongst that netsync support (whose automate versions incidentally have to be implemented in monotone at first as well), an improved changeset browser and probably other minor things and bugs which have been on hold since February.

The next guitone version won’t be out before monotone 0.46 hits the streets though, simply because I have to wait (and implement) a couple of things in monotone first and because I want to publish a release which does not explode the first time you’ll look at it. But hey, since I’m the release manager for monotone as well, its in my hands when it will be out Its also likely that I’ll introduce a beta release cycle for the next guitone release and make a couple of binaries so people get their hands on it easier and earlier.

So, stay tuned for more updates on both projects!

Maybe I’ll pick it up again in a few months, but I can’t guarantee that. For now, my thanks go to all the users and packagers for their time and for the support!

On a related note I’m working on a couple of new features for guitone. The next version will be able to create new monotone database and also create new projects from existing ones (basically a frontend for mtn setup). Furthermore I decided I should finally implement some workspace commands, so at least the equivalent of mtn add and mtn drop should be possible, mtn revert and mtn rename probably as well.

The monotone additions for netsync automation still not made it into trunk, mainly because I was not in the mood to finally fix the anticipated lua testing for stdio traffic (I really should not push this task further away, because the branch where the automate netsync stuff resides in diverges more and more over time…). And of course before this is not in monotone’s trunk it makes no sense to implement it in guitone either – so yeah, if you particularily wait for this feature, give me a kick in the butt so I get finally around.