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

[Martin Pool]

On 6/9/07, John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> wrote:

> 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.

For interest there are about 57e6 Google hits for 'bz', showing no
clear single meaning.  One amusing one is
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_Zulu meaning "well done".  Of
course in Unix as you say it's commonly associated with bzip2.

There are about 1.2e6 for 'bzr', most of which are about Bazaar.  And
there are about 532e6 for 'br', many of which are about Brazil or the
<br> tag.

So the change would mean going away from a word which is nearly
unambiguous, but that may be a fair tradeoff for ease of typing.
Switching to Dvorak has in general made most words so much easier to
type that I do notice 'bzr' is a bit cumbersome.

Just adding changing the command (or adding a second name for the
command) is easy; cleaning up everything else called bzr (.bzr,
bzrlib, etc) would be a pain.

I could certainly be happy with adding 'bz' as an alternative command
- to start with, by just installing a copy of the current 'bzr'
script.

-- 
Martin