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It is good to enable/disable menuitems to indicate to users the state of the selected item. For example, if the user has already Edited the currently selected item it would be good to disable the "Edit" menuitem. Likewise, don't enable "Commit" on an item that I have not yet "Edit"ed. You can probably find other menuitems which can also be disabled when they do not apply. Managing the menuitem state helps the user by: 1. giving them an indication of the state of the selected item, and 2. it narrows the list of actions they can perform on the selected item and that shorter list makes it easier for them to find the action they want to run. By the same reasoning, if a menuitem can NEVER apply for the selected item's type, then that menuitem should be removed completely from the list for that item type, rather than just being dimmed.
Only for your information: Support for this behaviour has already been implemented in both vcscvs and vcsgeneric modules. Please note that if the file is e.g. [Up-to-date] it can't be added once more to the repository and therefore "CVS | Add" action is disabled in its popup menu. Furthermore this is customizable by user in Generic VCS module through "Disabled on statuses" property of each command. If you set it to "Local" for Commit command you won't be allowed to run Commit on [Local] file. Is this what you meant ? OTOH it concerns only status and not the real state of the file i.e. it won't work for Edit command since it doesn't change the status. :-(
UI keyword added.