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*** Copying an email sent to the NBDT mailing list. I've just updated the instructions to download BetterBeansBinding (typical Maven project) in NetBeans, with a specific section for 6.7. You can read them at the bottom of http://kenai.com/projects/betterbeansbinding/pages/SoftwareFactory. In spite of the sentence I wrote "With NetBeans 6.7 things are easier since there's explicit Kenai support.", if I compare the two sequences indeed I don't find any big simplification in using the Kenai plugin; indeed there are 6 steps for NetBeans 6.5 and 6 steps for NetBeans 6.7. The only simpler thing is that you don't have to know the subversion URL, but only the name of the project; but I still need to manually enter "trunk/src" to avoid checking out the whole stuff with tags and branches. Not a major stuff, but one might expect that a specific plugin should make things *much* easier. Thoughts? In particular, since the meaning of the plugin - to me - is a very quick way to checkout and run a project that someone pointed me to (a blog, etc...) I'd like to see a "fast lane": 1. Select a menu "..../ Quick Kenai checkout" 2. I have a single dialog where I enter the project name in the search box and press "Search". 3. I select the project name and press Ok. Nothing else. The system automatically opens the project (including requiring projects) under a default location on my disk (e.g. the classic $HOME/NetBeansProjects) and perhaps a good idea could be to create a specific Project Group on the fly; also the details of the Subversion folder to check (e.g. "trunk/src") are automatically managed, either by a bit of heuristics ("trunk" and eventually a "src" subdirectory is present) or by adding an explicit "Main folder" property for the project in Kenai. It's also true that the same thing could be applied to the generic "Check out from Subversion" operation, by just replacing the search box for the project name with the subversion URL.
Since the original thought was about a way to push people to checkout a project with the less effort (thus, giving the least possible amount of information to fill in a form), I was guessing whether this is just crazy or not: would it be possible to define a specific URL such as: nbcheckout:http://kenai.... so that when you install NetBeans on an operating system it registers for being launched when you click on such a link. The remainder of the URL would contain all the needed information for performing the checkout. So one could just publish the link on the project website/wiki and people already having NetBeans installed would be able to checkout in one click. Of course, this would work for any repository, eventually NetBeans can guess it's a Kenai project looking at the URL if specific operations are needed (e.g. connecting to the site and retrieving further information about the issue tracker, chats and whatever).
Pre-filling 'trunk/src' for subversion repositories in Get Sources from Kenai dialog would be nice, there just might be a little issue in connecting to the repository to check if trunk/src is there (the known dialog for accepting a certificate might appear). Need to figure out if this is problem or not. Otherwise I'm not sure if Get Sources from Kenai could be simplified more. Now a separate dialog is shown for searching the project - but that could be hardly merged into the same dialog with specifying the checkout dir and target location, IMHO. To me it seems similar to invoking a file chooser (you do that in separate window). Maybe the combo box for selecting the repository could work a bit differently. If this dialog is invoked from the Kenai dashboard, the given Kenai project is preselected - which is fine. Maybe the dialog could open with focus in the field for selecting the target location, which is the most likely field to be changed. But if invoked from main menu (without context), currently the first known Kenai project is selected - which is most probably wrong. Also the combo box contains repositories of all Kenai projects opened in the dashboard. But if the user wanted any of these, why not to go through the dashboard? It seems more convenient, and they would also see there if the given project is not already checked-out... So in this case it seems the user rather needs to search for the project first. So perhaps the combo box should have no selection intitially, and maybe even the search dialog might open automatically (just a bit strange you get two dialogs open on invoking an action, but speeding up typical workflow).