Re: [Gnu-arch-users] clean up tla help

[David Allouche]

On Sun, 2005-11-20 at 01:29 +0100, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
>    100+ commands confuse the hell out of most people. Should I use
>    rbrowse or abrowse? get or grab? changes or diff? update or replay?
>    I can go on and on. We could show everything if the everything is
>    self consistant and orthogonal; however tla is clearly not the
>    case.
> 
> Wouldn't it then be better to make things self consitent instead?  Not
> exactly sure what you are refering to...

I can think of one project that whose stated purpose includes that, and
more: Bazaar. Also, the usual suspects should be mentioned as well:
Mercurial and revc (?), though I do not know how much emphasis they put
on user interface sanity.

I think Andy Tai made it clear that this sort far reaching changes are
out of scope for tla.

>   If the help output is so bad
> that it makes it hard to understand what a command does, then the
> output should be improved.

Now, to try being constructive, I believe Derek means that "improving"
the help message involves hiding as much stuff as possible. For example,
"replay" is an advanced, low-level command, the common use cases are
served by star-merge and update. The abrowse command is simpler to use
and (as I understand it) performs better than rbrowse (except maybe in
very late Bazaar1), although it is less flexible. I am not sure where
diff and changes stand in tla, but from what I (probably incorrectly)
recall, both commands serve different and equally useful purposes.

-- 
                                                            -- ddaa

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