(fwd) bzr shelve feedback

[Aaron Bentley]

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Meta-comment:
If you want to discuss what bzr shelve/unshelve should be like, it would
be much better to post to the list.  The only bug I see is
documentation.  The rest is in the eye of the beholder.

And since shelve/unshelve are part of the bzrtools plugin, not bzr, it's
not appropriate to file a bug against bzr.

Martin Pool wrote:

>     1. Why is it called bzr shelve? I'm human, I'm very familiar with
>     the idea of "undo/redo". "shelve", though it may align well to some
>     dictionarily precise definition, does not fit the goal my brain
>     formulates: I want to undo the changes I've made. Or I want to redo
>     what I undid. Period.

Unfortunately, there is no bzr tool that does what you described.

"Undo", as implemented by virtually all applications, undoes the last
operation performed.  So "bzr commit; bzr undo" would undo the commit.
We don't support that yet, but I'd like to take a crack at it after the
stable release.

Shelve is intended to help you separate out logically distinct changes.
 So you can say "Let's shelve those changes for now, and just commit the
other ones."

>     2. Given that shelve takes a [FILE...] argument, why does it
>     manually ask me to confirm "shelving" each file (or rather, that's
>     what I thought it was asking at first...it's actually asking me if I
>     want to not shelve each file)?

It is not prompting per file, it is prompting per-hunk.  Because each
patch hunk may be part of a different change, and its purpose is to
revert some changes while retaining others.

> This takes too much effort. If I
>     wanted to shelve just one of the changed files, I would have taken
>     advantage of the fact that I can do that by specifying filenames.

Since it's not prompting per file, this doesn't follow.  You may not
want to revert all the hunks, even if you selected just one file.
Anyhow, you can just press 'd' to accept the default for all hunks.

>     4. "Shelve these changes, or restart? [yrsiq?] (y)"
> 
>     This question reads a bit to me like "Are you happy with these
>     changes or do you want to erase you entire hard drive? [Yn]"

This is a prompt to accept the current hunk selections

>     I'm pretty confident that "y" is associated with "yes", but I find
>     the wording of this question ambiguous. "Shelve these changes?
>     [yrsiq?] (y)" would be an improvement, IMHO.

Your options at that point are
  ? - show help
  y - proceed to shelve selected changes.
  r - restart the hunk selection loop.
  s - show status of hunks.
  i - invert the current selection of all hunks.
  q - quit

I would say it's most important for the user to know that they can
1. continue
2. re-select their hunks

Aaron
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