[Gnu-arch-users] tla usage

[zander]

Hi,

in my company we are looking for an alternative to CVS, as we seem to have
outgrown it, and I was looking forward to trying arch this weekend.
Since I have debian installation was a breeze (apt-get install tla).
Then I started to read the tutorial on
    http://regexps.srparish.net/tutorial-tla/arch.html

which, it may be said, should be devided into seperate lessons; since this
is too much info in one go.  Very hard to look back on how you did it when
I fail to repeat it..

In the end I have come to two conclusions;
1) The promise of the technology in arch is very nice; the feature list is
basically uber-cool.
2) The technology is not finished IMO since its very very very very hard to
use.  As I also do usability in our company (and many OSs project) I have
seen my share of user interfaces; and this one, by far, is the most
untuitive I have ever seen.

Sorry, just had to get that off my chest.

Some points;
- tla is very stubborn,  and I feel I have to work around it quite a lot
instead of it helping me.
First example is that I wanted to do a quick import of an existing project.
I failed since an import or an commit was refused since there are several
source files that were not added.
If you used import; the idea of an import is that the adding is implicit;
so I don't have to do each manually...

So I moved to to using names tagging-method and imported that.
Something that brings me in problems later since now I have to do a clean
to remove auto-generated source files, since tla refuses to commit with
them present..

- the normal commands are way too long, non-intuitive and basically suck.
I want to check if someone else make changes.
    cvs up
    tla update --in-place .

    cvs commit -m "bla"
    tla make-log  && \
    vi ./+*  && \
    tla commit

    cvs checkout myProj
    tla categories
        myProj
    tla branches myProj
        myProj--mainline
    tla versions myProj--mainline
        myProj--mainline--0.1
    tla get myProj--mainline--0.1 myProj

notice the difference?

Please notice that I really am aware of many of the reasons this stuff was
done the way it is now;  but it is somethings I just can't make people use.

As in many interfaces the secret is to provide good defaults;  In each of these
cases tla _could_ have guessed what I wanted.  And not in a fussy guessing way;
in a really simple matter of rules.  Having this in place really makes the tool
look finished.  It certainly does not right now.

So; can we work together on making this a better product?  I'm a usability
expert looking for a cvs-replacement, and I ask you to abuse my knowledget.
That should be something you don't get every day :)

-- 
Thomas Zander