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

[Erik Bågfors]

I think (but I can be wrong)  that new two letter commands are not
allowed into debian.  They have to be at least 3 characters.

Something to think about..

/Erik - don't mind the name bzr at all...

On 6/8/07, John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> wrote:
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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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