Consistent use of -f/-d type option to specify subject of operation

[Marius Kruger]

2008/12/11 Colin D Bennett <colin at gibibit.com>

> These are some thoughts I've had on specifying the subject branch or
> tree to bzr commands.
>
> I've noticed that besides the 'revision-info' command, for which I
> noticed Michael Hudson recently provided a nice patch, that a number of
> bzr commands still require the current directory to be set to the
> target of the operation.  For instance:
>
> - send (edit: nope, it just uses a different option from the others)[1]
> - switch
> - bind
> - conflicts
> - nick
>
> While most of the time, using the current directory is usually the
> most convenient option for interactive use, when you are using remote
> branches that are only accessible via 'bzr://' or 'http://' and not
> accessible as filesystem objects, these commands are unusable.
>
> Some commands only make sense for a working tree, so it's less
> important for those that the directory can be specified (i.e., they
> must already be accessible on the filesystem).
>
> [1]:
> Actually, after looking at the help for 'send', I noticed a
> -f/--from=ARG option that looks like it would allow making merge
> directives for remote branches.  However, I have a hard time
> comprehending the distinction between -d/--directory=ARG (used by many
> commands) and -f/--from=ARG (used by 'send' and perhaps others).  Is
> there a good reason that '-d' was abandoned for 'send'?
>
> Could we have a universal option to specify the *subject* of the
> operation; by this I mean that *subject* is defined as whatever the
> current directory would mean:  for 'send', the subject is currently
> specified by the '--from' option, while for 'push' the subject is
> currently specified by the '--directory' option.
>

I agree that we need a standard option (like -v or -q)
which would effectively run the command as if you first cd into that
directory.
This would be very useful for eg. bash scripting where at the moment
our scripts look like:
cd x
bzr missing
cd y
bzr missing

regards
marius
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