[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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