Public Impressions

[John Arbash Meinel]

I've been reading some posts from here:
http://blog.ianbicking.org/dvcs-mini-roundup.html

And the biggest thing I get from it is that we need to clean up our
presentation to outside people. We have a lot of terms and
functionality, and such. But I think we really need to take some time, and:

1) Clean up the Wiki. James B did a lot of great work in that regard,
but it sounds like our tutorials are not very straightforward.
Especially now that we have checkouts and repositories, I think we need
to present things well.
I'm not the greatest documentation person, but I was thinking some sort
of very basic tutorial, which would only follow best practices.
Something that could either start with the very simple "bzr init; bzr
add; bzr commit". Or it could go a little bit more with a "bzr init-repo
$wd; bzr init foo; cd foo ..".
I think the latter is a much better "best practice" since it makes all
of your branching underneath $wd dirt-cheap. And now that we have knits,
it doesn't require copying *everything* everywhere. (With a shared repo
and weaves, all of your revisions of every project get copied, with
knits, only involved revisions get pulled).

But more than just the Tutorial, we need someone to follow all of the
links, and get rid of any cruft that isn't accurate anymore.

2) Manually go through the tutorial and make mistakes while we are at
it. Just to get the real impression about how the interface works, and
how it complains when you do something wrong.

3) Consider changing the program name. A lot of people don't like to
type "bzr". My co-worker aliased it to "bar", because then his pinky
doesn't have to move as much. It would be great if we could find
something that only used home-row keys. The other problem with bzr on
Qwerty is that it reuses the same finger for b & r (on dvorak it uses 3
fingers, but the letters are just as spread out).

Other than 'bar', I can't come up with any good combinations from the
letters "bazaar". I suppose baa is pretty easy to type :)


I think 0.8 is going to be an excellent release, with lots of great
features, and vastly improved performance. But we need to get it out
there in such a way that people can see that, and actually use it.

John
=:->

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