(controversial) Renaming "bzr" => "bz"

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Hi all-

A long while back it was brought up if we wanted to change the name of the
command line program, to something that was a bit easier to type. We
bike-shedded for a while and didn't really get anywhere. So in the end, nothing
changed. (Partly because it was felt it wasn't really that important).

It was brought up again at our sprint in London, partially because there was
someone who was blogging about the "simple pleasures" of typing commands which
are easy on the fingers.

So I went ahead and aliased 'bzr' => 'bz' for the last couple weeks to give it
a shot and see what I think of it.

Now, I'm very much the wrong person to try out this experiment because:

a) I've been typing 'bzr' for a couple years now, and it is pretty hard-coded.
b) I have to type "vi bzrlib/*" or "cd bzrlib" a lot, so I still have to type
'bzr' all the time. Also the selftest is "./bzr" so it still gets typed.

But overall, I've found that I've adapted fairly well and (b) wouldn't be a
problem if we actually changed the name. Overall, I can't say that I've noticed
much of a difference, but point (a) is the real killer there.

I feel like these are the main points:

a) 'bz' is 2 characters instead of 3. Which is actually significant for a
command that you type a lot. Especially something like "bz st" you can save a
reasonable amount of finger time. Heck, on small trees typing "bz st" takes as
long as it takes for the command to finish.

b) bz is associated with bzip2 in most peoples heads. However they really are
associating 'bz2', so I don't think it is a hard jump. It may make searching
for "bz" a little bit harder in google. But the project is "Bazaar"

c) I think "bz" is significantly easier to *say* than "bzr", but that isn't
really a main point.

d) Changing names is a difficult thing, we've been going through it with
Bazaar-NG => Bazaar, and deprecating Baz 1.x. (Trying to distance ourselves
from it). Also, we can't have a "bz" package, so we would have to rename the
debian/gentoo/fedora/etc packages to really be "bazaar", which requires some
conflicts against the existing Bazaar 1.x package. However, since we really
need to fix that up anyway, this is a good time to fix up the command name, too.

e) 'bzr' has an awkward placement of keys because the 'r' is on the top row,
while 'bz' are on the bottom row. (Interestingly enough this is true on both
dvorak and qwerty, just on different hands, and slightly different fingers. I
find it slightly easier to type of dvorak because it uses 3 fingers rather than
re-using the index finger).


Overall, I think I'm in favor of the command name change, I'll probably
continue to use the alias, and see how it goes. Though probably it would be
better for other people to do that, and report in, since I'm not the average user.

John
=:->

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