Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Low level vs. high level UI

[Pierce T . Wetter III]

> >    Really, I suspect if the aba, tla-contrib, and tla-tools guys just
> > pooled all their stuff, we'd have a good start. They just don't seem 
> > to
> > be doing that, and their documentation is kind of sketchy.
>
> Given that aba is part of tlacontrib, your statement doesn't make any
> sense.

  Yeah, what I really meant is "pooled their efforts, and documented". 
aba is distributed with tlacontrib, but its not really integrated.

 In tlacontrib, you have aba, which is kind of a front end for tla that 
implements some handy stuff like aliases (but has super minimal 
documentation, I had to browse the source to find out I could do aba 
help command), but then there are other scripts in tlacontrib that 
aren't integrated.

 So it seems to me like aba is a good building block, and should 
subsume some of the tla-contrib scripts and some of the tla-tools 
scripts, and eventually become the "thing you run instead of tla, 
unless you want to do something weird".

 Assuming of course, that tla doesn't adopt some of the aba stuff, like 
aliases, or some of the high-level commands.

 But again, I'm a GUI developer, not a nuts-and-bolts guy, so I prefer 
high-level interfaces. Perhaps you do too, which is why you wrote aba.

 What I think is that if you all sat down together and brainstormed a 
bit, you could come up with a vastly simplified interface to tla, and 
implement it in aba. You'd probably have to make some assumptions about 
the BEST(TM) way to do things (or have some way that users could 
specify their preferences), but people could hit the ground running 
with arch.

 After a while, there would be some cross-propagation between aba and 
tla, because Tom would think, "ya know, that should really be in tla", 
and a feature would move over. People writing GUI tools would use the 
scripts in aba as a starting point, etc.

 Something like that is inevitable really, its just whether it would 
happen soon, or later. I'd rather it happened sooner, because I'd like 
to see all this arch knowledge move into code, so that I can have a 
small set of "aba" knowledge instead of a large set of "arch" 
knowledge.

 Pierce

P.S.

  aba suggestions:

  have a register-archive that both registered the archive, and built 
an alias:

aba register-archive jblack address@hidden 
http://arch.linuxguru.net/~jblack/{archives}/2004

would let me use

^jblack for address@hidden

 In the big picture, aliases are a general high-level facility so that 
aba users can work with much shorter names. I would think that aliases 
should be names that they tend to create as they go along with other 
aba commands like "branch-this" and "tag-this".