Public Impressions
Ramon Diaz-Uriarte
rdiaz02 at gmail.com
Fri May 5 18:55:24 BST 2006
On 5/5/06, John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
As a beginner, the issue of "best practices" is in fact very relevant,
as well as adding information on some of the latest improvements. As
well, examples of "workflows" would be great (e.g., all the great
advice I got on the usage of a remote central repository).
After following the docs currently available, I think I am probably
not using bzr "optimally".
> 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.
Actually, I had no major complaints about this part. Following
IntroductionToBzr, QuickHackingWithBzr and TheIndependant was
straightforward. (Though I knew there was important stuff missing,
including some new stuff in bzr itself, as well as mention to some
plugins, such as bzrtools or bzrk).
>
> 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've seen this mentioned before, but I have no complaints about it and
its easy to remember.
Best,
R.
>
> 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
> =:->
>
>
>
>
--
Ramon Diaz-Uriarte
Bioinformatics Unit
Spanish National Cancer Centre (CNIO)
http://ligarto.org/rdiaz
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