[MERGE/RFC] Userdoc Driven Design on the Bazaar 2.0 UI

[Ben Finney]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:

> As an explanation of the status quo, I agree it's excellent.  As a
> marketing tool, I'd say it highlights just how geeky Bazaar has
> become.

Hah! My observation is that Bazaar has become, over its development,
significantly *less* geeky as time goes on.

> It is quite clear from the tutorial that effective use of the vaunted
> flexibility of bzr needs intimate knowledge of implementation details.
> 
> But I don't understand *why* it's needed.

I would say its necessary simply because the natural tendency is for the
software interface to get more complex as it develops, and it takes
significant effort to make it simpler.

> It seems to me that "bzr init-repo" is the kind of thing that users
> should not need to know about, period.  The fine distinctions (or lack
> of them) among branch, checkout, and clone, and merge, pull, and
> update are confusing, especially since their semantics differ across
> the various VCSes the user may have experience with. :-(

The explanation for why this is the case is easy: those are all
artefacts of features being added or changed, and requiring different
interfaces to allow them to be used in conjunction with the existing
features. That the new is now recommended over the old is a development
that necessarily comes *after* the new has been around for a while;
nobody has yet put in the work to transition the interface to match.

You probably know this, but from the way you're asking the questions
it's not clear.

-- 
 \       “One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.” |
  `\                                                 —Henry L. Mencken |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney