Proposal: separate script interface

[Aaron Bentley]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Hi all,

I'd like to propose that we provide a separate interface for scripting,
instead of trying to support scripting with the same UI that we offer to
 commandline users.

In the Arch world, trying to maintain compatibility with scripts has
hampered introduction of better functionality, while support for
scripting has added many commands and command options that have no value
or are actually dangerous for commandline users.

Had I written baz2bzr using the commandline interface, I would have
wanted the option of specifying the revision-id.  But there's no use
case for commandline users to supply the revision-id, and in fact, it's
dangerous.

So I think it makes sense to provide a separate scripting UI.  It would
be updated whenever scripters needed functionality that didn't make
sense for the commandline-- for commands not provided by the scripting
UI, scripters would use the standard UI (or perhaps the scripting UI
would fall through to the standard UI, but that might mean that the
behaviour of the scripting UI could change.).

One way to do this would be to introduce a "script" command, which had
its own set of subcommands.  So you might do

"bzr script commit --uuid asd;lghas;ldi --committer 'Martin Pool
<mpool at bazaar-ng.org> --author 'Aaron Bentley
<aaron.bentley at utoronto.ca>' -m 'Added Aaron's patch'"

You could have a --script option instead, but I don't think that would
be as clear.  Another option would be to use a separate comand name for
the scripting interface, like 'bzrscript' instead of 'bzr'.

Aaron
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFCqahi0F+nu1YWqI0RAqi0AJ9FxUOB26N4ZAk+N8WKB9rMPeNfbwCfaG6D
N0zc3susz68zkQ+5pYViPVY=
=im0T
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----