[darcs-users] removing commands or moving commands into an "advanced" section
Zooko Journeyman
zooko at zooko.com
Fri Aug 13 13:27:36 UTC 2004
I'm resending this because David didn't respond to it last time. Last
time I combined three different suggestions into one letter. This time
I'm sending each suggestion separately. If David doesn't respond to it
this time I'll let it drop. ;-)
My motivation for writing this was that I couldn't find the command
that would list which patches are in the current repo even after
scanning the manual and the output of "darcs help". It turns out that
command is named "darcs changes" and is documented in both places, but
I didn't see it. Since the number of different darcs commands has
grown, it is increasingly hard to find the one you want when you are
just learning darcs, therefore I proposed:
On 2004, Aug 03, , at 10:52, Zooko wrote:
A third thing that might help is if there were fewer commands, or if
some commands were relegated to an "advanced" section of the docs.
Darcs has a well-deserved reputation for being simpler and easier to
learn than its competitors, but as the number of commands continues to
grow, so this advantage might be lessening.
I guess "darcs get" can always be implemented with "mkdir d && cd d &&
darcs initialize && darcs fetch", so "darcs get" could be relegated to
an "advanced" or "convenience" category. Alternately, "darcs pull"
could do a "darcs initialize" first if the current working directory
doesn't already contain a repository. Perhaps it should first prompt
the user to see if this was an accident.
I could write "darcs diff -u > p && darcs revert && patch -p0 < p"
instead of "darcs revert && darcs unrevert" (I also used that trick
when I was using CVS). So a newcomer learning darcs could safely delay
learning about "unrevert" until he's mastered the basic commands that
are absolutely required.
I wonder if "darcs diff" and "darcs whatsnew" shouldn't be a single
command which behaves differently depending on its arguments (as "cvs
diff" does). I don't really understand what "darcs whatsnew" does that
"darcs diff" doesn't do.
I still don't understand how "darcs unpull" relates to "darcs unrecord"
and "darcs rollback", so even if "unpull" and "rollback" aren't
convenience commands, they are certainly advanced commands. (Actually
I've now learned what "darcs rollback" is for. But it could still be
moved to an "advanced" section because newcomers don't need it right
away.)
Okay, I'll stop for now and see what kind of reception this line of
though receives.
Regards,
Zooko
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