[darcs-users] Naming consistency between darcs and other DVCSs

[Dan Pascu]

On 16 Jul 2009, at 04:17, Trent W. Buck wrote:

>> We don't want to alienate existing users either. I'd go the route of
>> adding hidden git-ish aliases and keep our terminology whenever it
>> makes more sense (both record and changes are more sensible than
>> commit and log).
>
> +1.
>
> Then, at some point, we can swap around what the hidden alias is, so
> that eventually "darcs commit" will be documented and "darcs record"
> will be a backwards-compatible alias.  Such a change was recently
> demonstrated (for darcs move vs. darcs mv, IIRC) and seems to have
> worked.


But the cases are quite different. While mv vs move is just a minor  
change that replaced an abbreviation with a full word having the same  
meaning, record vs commit are quite different in their semantics. And  
to be honest record is a much better name considering the context.

While with mv the argument was around some confusion that mv had in  
relation with its OS command counterpart, with commit the argument is  
quite thin: others use commit. The only argument one could raise  
against move is that one has to type 2 more letters compared to mv,  
but otherwise they are completely equivalent. Not the same thing can  
be said about commit, which if it would become the main command, I  
would consider it a big issue.

--
Dan