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

[Andrew Bennetts]

On Mon, Jan 16, 2006 at 06:42:36PM +0100, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
>    How hard did you look to find what the UI changes were?  They're
>    *much* more extensive than this simple list.  See
>    e.g. http://wiki.gnuarch.org/BazaarVsTla, which I don't think is
>    exhaustive despite its length.
> 
> I didn't look hard at all, but if they are so extensive, then they
> should be noticble directly.

They were to me, as I have said.

>    Personally, I found that commands such as "baz branch", "baz
>    switch", and making most commands (including those two and "get")
>    accept URLs made baz much more, nicer conflict tracking, annotate,
>    and so on made it much more pleasant for me to use than tla.
>    branch and switch in particular made a *huge* difference, I found
>    myself using them regularly as soon as they were introduced.
> 
> All of these are minor improvments, and nothing significant.  For tla
> you had `tla-fork', and `tla-switch'.  Just two new commands that make
> things easier, but nothing that changes the UI in any significant way.

No, I didn't have those commands.  There were a huge number of scripts people
had layered upon tla, and I didn't have time to research them all for relevance
and currency, let alone download them, build them, hope they worked with the
current version of tla, etc.  Having useful commands built-in is a significant
win.  Or at least, it was for me.

The fact that later versions of tla picked up some of these new commands
suggests that tla maintainer also considered there to be substantial enough
benefit to having the commands built-in to outweigh the cost of extra code.

>    Perhaps those UI changes don't interest you, but to me, they were a
>    significant improvement.
> 
> Making UI changes do interest me, but the claims that baz somehow made
> extensive changes to the UI is simply false.  Most of this was already
> done by tla, and if there was a improvment, it was minor.

What part of "to me, they were a significant improvement" did you not
understand?

The improvement for me was not minor.  baz made my life much easier (I was using
it every day as my primary revision control tool for my work) than tla.  I'm
quite willing to believe the change was not as dramatic for everyone -- UI is
definitely an area where Your Mileage May Vary considerably between different
people doing different things.

But just because the changes and tweaks made by baz apparently don't add up to
much for you, don't assume they didn't for me.  Particularly when I've stated as
clearly as I can that improvement I saw was significant, not minor.

Perhaps the situation with current versions of baz vs. current versions of tla
is less pronounced now -- I don't pretend to have an opinion, I haven't used
either to any large extent since I switched to bzr.  But I stand by my comments
about the baz I was using being a significant improvement over the tla of the
time.

-Andrew.