Merge git-gui into 1.5.0 ?

One of my goals for git-gui is to get it merged into core Git, so there is a GUI tool available out-of-the-box for commit creation, (some) branch manipulation, basic merging, and pushing/fetching changes.

I'm wondering, should that start to occur as part of 1.5.0? Its one .sh script, like gitk. :)

Given all of the other changes going into 1.5.0, and how much news we're probably going to try to attract to this release, it may be nice to be able to say "we also have a commit creating GUI".

The main idea behind git-gui is to provide a complete enough UI that someone can work on files stored in a Git repository without needing to drop to the command line. By sticking to Tcl/Tk, git-gui is available anywhere gitk is.

It would be nice if all operations available on the command line were also available through git-gui, but I think that is a very difficult goal to reach. The command line interface is simply more powerful and much more expressive. So I'm really just aiming to make an interface that the average user can use to do collaboration through Git, without needing to fall back on git-cvsserver and a CVS client. I fully expect 'power' users to use the command line. You know who you are. ;-)

That said, operations like `git gui blame rev file` may simply be better in the GUI, even for power users, as it offers some way to visualize the annotation data and navigate through it. So I'm also trying to make those parts of git-gui easily available from the command line, when possible.

Another example is `git gui citool` (or `git citool` if git-citool is a symlink/hardlink to git-gui), which will open the UI for just one commit. Users of that-other-SCM-used-before-Git's citool subcommand may like this feature, as it offers somewhat similiar functionality, and some nice extras. ;-)

Right now git-gui is being used in production by myself and about 5 other coworkers of mine (the rest were either die-hard command line users already, or found out how useful the command line is and now refuse to give it up!). It has thus far proven to be pretty stable and easy to use. Its running stably on both Mac OS X and Windows.

It is also lacking the critical `git clone` operation.  ;-)

Thoughts?  Anyone interested can check out the repository:

  gitweb:  http://repo.or.cz/w/git-gui.git
  git:     git://repo.or.cz/git-gui.git