[RFC] Several levels of expertise for bzr

[Matthieu Moy]

Hi,

An idea that I've had for quite some time, and that it may be time to
think about for bzr.

Basically, the idea is to have a configuration option to say wether
the user is novice, regular user or expert.

The general ergonomy of bzr is designed to make it easy to start with.
That is, the learning curve of the first tens of minutes is excellent.
But after that, there are tradeouts that are not easy to make, like
whether a given command should be in bzrtools or in the core, whether
an option is worth adding to a command.

I think a way to solve that is to have a configuration option,
typically, in ~/.bazaar/bazaar.conf,

# turn this to "regular" or "expert" when you think you are so.
user_expertise = novice

by default. As long as this is "novice", lots of commands would be
hidden from "bzr help commands", some informative messages could be
added here and there. For example, one could imagine this :

$ bzr init
Standalone branch created.
Use "bzr add" to add files, and then "bzr commit"
to create the first revision.
$ bzr add
$ bzr commit -m foo
Revision commited locally. You may want to use "bzr push" to publish
it.
$ _

(the kind of thing that I love to see the first time, but that would
be too boring if it was allways on).


This is how Gnus (Emacs newsreader) works, and I appreciated it.

In particular, I think this would solve elegantly the problem of
moving commands from bzrtools to bzr core. Dummy users will never
change the configuration option, and won't be disturbed by advanced
commands, while experts can activate all of them changing one line in
a configuration file (nothing to install). Indeed, commands would
already be usable but just hidden from help messages.

Well, just my 2cents ;-).

Any opinion?

-- 
Matthieu