08:16 < abentley> Better phrasing: 'what circumstances should cause us to produce a working tree in a repository branch'?

[Aaron Bentley]

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Denys Duchier wrote:
> Aaron Bentley <aaron.bentley at utoronto.ca> writes:

>>It is true that bzr create and bzr checkout would both need to avoid
>>performing bad operations on existing directories.  But bzr create would
>>also need to ensure that the options passed to it made sense.
> 
> 
> Yes.  My point was that in both designs you cannot escape having to check that
> what the user requested makes sense.  A very small point possibly in favour of
> my suggestion is that you'd only have to check it in one command.

Since you also have to do more checking in 'create', I think it balances
out even.

>>I am saying "branch", "create-repository", and "checkout" are better
>>commands than "create",
> 
> 
> Ok, so now we have the beginning of a counter proposal.

Sorry if I was too vague earlier, about breaking the useful cases out
into separate commands.  "checkout" has been planned for some time, but
I don't think we had a repository creation verb.

> Perhaps we could look at the use cases
> and see how these commands would work in practice (for example standalone vs
> repo branch, etc...)

Standalone:
bzr branch foo

Starting work on a new repository branch:
bzr create-repository repo
bzr branch foo repo/bar
bzr checkout repo/bar

Starting work using ~ as a repo (ugh):
bzr create-repository ~ --allow-trees
bzr branch foo

Starting work on a bound branch:
bzr checkout --deep sftp://bazaar-ng.org/bzr/bzr.dev
(I'm still not sure about this one.  In many important respects, bound
branches behave like checkouts)

> I agree with that, but I don't believe that scrolling to the right use case
> section when you request extensive help is going to be such a problem.  Finding
> the right command is also a problem and that one is addressed by my suggestion.

I think we're just giving different weights to the advantages and
disadvantages.  And possibly that you're not counting the win of using
terminology familiar from other VCSes.

> I don't have the benefit of conventional experience in customer support: my only
> "customers" have been colleagues in computer science and computational
> linguistics.

At work, our product has extensive, narrative help, but many people
would rather phone or write us than read it.  So we certainly find that
longer help is less likely to be read.

> Anything
> beyond add, commit and update, and they'd send me email asking for help.  In
> this respect, fewer commands seemed preferable.

So here, we're definitely differing on what constitutes a command.  I'd
claim that creating an empty repository is a unique command, whether
it's phrased as "bzr create-repository" or "bzr create --repository".

> BTW, I suspect that your choice of "branch", "create-repository" and "checkout"
> is so that they are all verbs;

Yes.  Also because 'branch' and 'checkout' are used in other VCSes, so
people who know them can transfer their knowledge to bzr more easily.

 but we also use two of these words as nouns: we
> speak of a "branch", a "checkout", but not a "create-repository".  That last one
> doesn't play nice with noun/verb puning.

So in this case, your suggestion of 'store' would be a verb, but
probably one with the wrong connotations :-)

Aaron
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