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

[Aaron Bentley]

On Wed, 2004-02-25 at 13:01, Pierce T. Wetter III wrote:
>    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), 

It says "Use aba command -h for help on `command', or aba help command
for detailed help" at the bottom of "aba help" output.  But it's just a
frill-- aba command -H still works too.

>   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".

I'm not interested in userping other peoples' work.  Especially Tom's.  

So far, only Gergely Nagy's shown an interest in having his tlacontrib
script available in aba.  And even he didn't want it subsumed-- he just
wanted an aba wrapper for the tla-archive-locate script.  (It's not
there because I pointed out that what he really wanted was
auto-register-archive, which he then wrote.)

I think we should wait until tlacontrib ships with tla before we
consider declaring aba some kind of official interface for tla, though I
appreciate the vote of confidence.

>   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.

I prefer easy interfaces, not simple ones.  For example, I use vim.  And
I can use aba exactly the way I use tla.

>   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.

My view is that gradual evolution is a more certain way of generating a
set of useful commands than high-level design.

> 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.

Actually, I think you'd need a different kind of scripting, e.g.

foo$ tla-setup

Setup for Tom Lord's Arch
=========================

Please enter your full name: Aaron Bentley

Please enter you email address: abentleypanoramicfeedback.com

That doesn't appear to be a valid email address!
Please enter you email address: address@hidden

ID created!

Please enter a directory where tla can store data
[/home/abentley/.tla-storage]:

etc, 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.

I agree that tla's large command set represents a fairly high barrier to
entry.  On the other hand, I only use about 7 commands 95% of the time. 
I'd like to see a tla HOWTO document that gets you started with a good
setup, rather than trying to explain all the choices.

> 
>   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

I tend to use aliases for fully-qualified version names, e.g.
address@hidden/tlacontrib--devo--1.2, so that
would not be useful for me.  But if you'd like to write it,
contributions are always welcome.  

>   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".

Oh, I almost always branch into the default archive.  So I haven't seen
the need for it.  How would you use it?

Aaron

-- 
Aaron Bentley
Director of Technology
PanoMetrics, Inc.