[darcs-users] Programmatic invocation

[David Roundy]

On Fri, Nov 04, 2005 at 02:04:29PM +0100, Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:
> Am Freitag, 4. November 2005 13:37 schrieb David Roundy:
> > On Fri, Nov 04, 2005 at 01:31:13PM +0100, Radosaw Grzanka wrote:
> >
> > Changing letter shortcuts is very human-unfriendly.
> 
> What about internationalization?  For example, for me as a German it is
> more desirable to press J if I mean yes than to press Y because "yes" is
> "ja" in German.

Possibly.  Unless you're a vi user, or someone comfortable with the default
bindings of "less" or "aptitude", in which case you might appreciate having
'j' mean down.  And unless you want to ask for help on the mailing list.

In general, I'm not convinced that internationalization is appropriate in a
tool like darcs.  We don't have internationalized programming languages
(or do we? maybe I'm just being an ignorant american), and I'm not sure
that for command-line tools it's beneficial for the user-input side of
things.

Certainly it would be nice to have human-readable output text
internationalized, but I'd suspect that trying to translate the input to
darcs would do more harm than good.  We have enough trouble with people not
understanding pull/unpull/unrecord/etc, without trying to translate them
into other languages.  Translating the long flag names (--summary, etc)
would render online help confusing, and wouldn't gain much over just
translating their descriptions.

Of the twelve single-character inputs to push, one is redundant with '?'
(which I didn't count among the twelve), three have no relationship to an
english word, one is 'p' for "PAGER", which is a posix standard environment
variable (and thus identical on all posix systems), and one has an english
mnemonic, but that word isn't used in the description of its meaning.  So I
guess the real question is whether it's worth shuffling these around for
various languages.  It would depend on how awkward you find 'y' and 'n'
(the two most commonly used options).

In any case, if we ever support an internationalized input scheme (which
would take some convincing), it would ned to be made optional.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net