[MERGE] Add two new help topics

James Westby jw+debian at jameswestby.net
Mon Apr 16 20:26:01 BST 2007


On (16/04/07 12:09), John Arbash Meinel wrote:
> James Westby wrote:

Thanks for the comments John. I want to incorporate most of them, and
will send a bundle for that when I have a bit of time to assemble one. I
just wanted to respond to a few comments now.

> > +                    warning('This transport does not update the working ' 
> > +                            'tree of: %s. See \'bzr help ' % br_to.base + \
> > +                            'working-trees\' for more information.')
> 
> ^- This is a really weird way of doing this. Why not just do:
> 
> warning("This transport does not update the working "
>         "tree of: %s. See 'bzr help working-trees' "
>         "for more information." % (br_to.base,))

Thanks for pointing this out. I realise my way was strange, but in the
past I have been doing

  "line 1" + \
  "line 2"

which if you add '% ()' at the end is wrong as it is substituting in the
wrong string. Thanks for informing me about the better syntax.

> 
> v- '--no-trees' is even more important now, because it is no longer the
> default. (As of 0.15, IIRC).  You wouldn't really be doing "bzr checkout
> --lightweight" when you have working trees.
> 
> I would leave the '--no-trees' at the beginning, remove the "or". and
> just have "See 'bzr help repositories' ...".

This was in direct response to a user problem on #bzr, he saw the
example and copied it, and then didn't understand why he didn't get
trees. I know that we changed the default to try and avoid that, so it's
a shame it is still happening, but I appreciate it is important to
emphasise the --no-trees now. I will try and come up with something that
emphasises it without making it look like it should always be use.

> ^- I'm not sure about having plugins mentioned in bzr core... If the
> functionality is that important, maybe it should be core.

Yes I see your point, and that is another discussion. I think you know
more than most how often this has to be explained, as you deal with a
lot of questions on IRC, where the conversation runs along the lines of

  A: What does 'this transport will not update the working tree of ...'
     mean?
  B: It is remote and difficult to do right.
  A: I want a working tree there, how do I get one?
  B: ssh to the server and run bzr update.
  A: Do I have to do that every time?
  B: Yes, but there are plugins to help...

I specifically wanted to give the user all these answers right there,
referenced from the warning message.

We could just give them the first half here, and let them try and find
the rest, but we can give them all the information, so I think we
should. 90% of these IRC conversations point to the plugins rather than
the remove-tree command I would estimate.

Thanks for your comments.

Would it be possible to get a freeze exception for this, as I probably
will not be able to get it updated tonight?

Thanks,

James

-- 
  James Westby   --    GPG Key ID: B577FE13    --     http://jameswestby.net/
  seccure key - (3+)k7|M*edCX/.A:n*N!>|&7U.L#9E)Tu)T0>AM - secp256r1/nistp256



More information about the bazaar mailing list