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

[David Allouche]

On Sat, 2005-12-31 at 03:36 +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...
> 
> [...snip...]
> 
>    I think Andy Tai made it clear that this sort far reaching changes
>    are out of scope for tla.
> 
> I don't think that improving `tla help' is such a far reaching change.

Thanks for replying. It is now clear that I failed to convey my meaning.
I will try to clarify.

"We could show everything if everything was self consistent", here
"everything" clearly means "we could show all of the command set". In
that context "make things self consistent" can only mean "restructure
the command set to provide a sane user interface". Which is what Bazaar
started out to do and why I made a reference to it in the part of my
reply that you did not quote.

I will try to make the gist of the issue clear:

        The user interface of TLA is insane. In part for shallow
        reasons, which have been partially fixed in Bazaar1. In part for
        very deep model reasons which are fixed in Bazaar2, and as far
        as I can tell in revc.

Some people are comfortable with the byzantine command set and
semantics, to the point that the insanity of TLA's user interface
becomes a cognitive blind spot. Been there, done that.

Probably, keeping that in mind in future discussion on this mailing list
will help you make better sense of what other people say.

>    Now, to try being constructive, I believe Derek means that
>    "improving" the help message involves hiding as much stuff as
>    possible.
> 
> And I stronly disagree with hiding useful, even if it is not often
> used (which is why it imperative that it is easily locatable),
> information is a good idea.

If I remember properly, tla will now do "by default" archive-setup in
tag and import. That makes "make-category/branch/version" commands
_useless_ except for backwards compatibility. Should that be hidden in
the default listing, in your opinion?

Now, if your argument is that the spirit of "tla help" is fine, it just
needs to be updated a bit, fine. I really do not care.
-- 
                                                            -- ddaa

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