class 'intent' documentation

[John A Meinel]

Erik Bågfors wrote:
> 2005/12/23, John Yates <jyates at netezza.com>:
>> Thursday, December 22, 2005 11:19 PM Robert Collins wrote:
>>
>>> I've started some documentation about the key classes in bzrlib at
>>> http://bazaar.canonical.com/Classes.
>> The Classes/Branch page opens with this description
>>
>>   A Branch is a key user concept - its a single line of history
>>   that one or more people have been committing to. A single CVS
>>   modules' MAIN is a branch, as is 'trunk/module' in svn.
>>
>> This crystallized for me my vague discomfort with the term "branch".
>> To me branch suggests development that is subordinate to some trunk,
>> a flavor of fork.  It is a term that focuses on the relationship
>> of some work to other work.  The misleading connotations are
>> especially jarring when starting a new project or when taking
>> about the principal branch in a centralized development model.
>>
>> While this may often (even very often) be an interesting attribute
>> of a bzr branch it is not its essence.  That essence is suggested
>> in Robert's definition.  A branch is a line of history or evolution.
>>
>> Would it be too late to seek more felicitous terminology?  I am not
>> sure that I have an ideal candidate.  I do like "line", similar to a
>> cell line.  It resonates with the term "mainline".  Is the potential
>> for confusion when we are writing lines of code too great?
>>
> 
> 
> I got the same reaction when showing ppl bzr.  If you want to follow a
> 'branch'(using bzr branch and bzr pull), at least one person got
> confused by the command 'bzr branch', because he claimed that he
> didn't want to create a new branch, he just wanted to 'get' the branch
> to follow it.
> 
> In general, I don't think that there is anything wrong with the
> therminology, but it has to be clearly defined.  I think no matter how
> you twist and turn branch/repository/archives/etc, there is a chance
> for confusion.
> 
> 
> /Erik
> 
> 

Well, for your friends, you could just have them type:

bzr get http://foo

'get' is currently an alias for 'branch. However, in the future we might 
be changing 'get' to mean 'give me a checkout', versus 'give me a 
standalone branch'. So I don't know if you want to do that. But if it 
makes them feel better, 'bzr get' does already exist.

John
=:->