Better name for dpush wanted

[Martin Pool]

2009/4/17 Jelmer Vernooij <jelmer at vernstok.nl>:

>> 1. It seems likely you're going to want to always turn this on for a
>> particular destination repository, if that repository's policy is
>> there should be no foreign metadata.  If it's an option we can set it
>> in locations.conf and then not remember to use it every time.  (I's
>> possible we can have an option that says "when I say push really do
>> push-lossy" but then you're effectively giving this behaviour to
>> push.)
>>
> That's a good point.

For me that's the tiebreaker.

>> 2. If this is going to be used only in exceptional circumstances, I
>> think it's less prominent than being a whole new top-level command.
>>
> I'm not sure about this - dpush is hidden, the push options are shown to
> users when they type "bzr help push".

(Tangentially, maybe 'hidden' is no longer a good name for these
because they're not totally hidden, and it should be 'minor commands'
or something.  But omg let's not have another synonym thread on this
right now.)

Making it hidden helps in some aspects, but not totally.  If people
need to use this, they need to discover it and it'll still be shown
(iirc) in 'bzr help commands -v'.

>> 3. It's possible (maybe unlikely) that we'd eventually want it to
>> apply to other commands, like maybe 'merge -d TARGET --lossy thing'.
>> This is a bit of a stretch maybe but it seems at least plausible that
>> it's not really specific to push.
>>
> Perhaps it would be relevant to "bzr commit" (in a bound branch) or "bzr
> pull" (into a Subversion working copy), as these create or copy
> revisions. I'm not sure how common these are though, nobody has asked
> for them yet.
>
> The main problem I have with dpush as an option to push is that we'd
> have to also add the options relevant to dpush to push and this clutters
> the push UI.  Right now there is just --no-rebase, but it's not unlikely
> there will be more options in the future.

It's not inherently unreasonable to have options which only work, or
conversely which are not allowed if another option is given.  I don't
really have a sense of how many other options there will be or what it
will look like in the code.

> I wonder if it would be possible to have sections in the listings of
> options in help? We could e.g. have a section for dpush-related options.
> Samba already does this for most commands, and it makes it a bit easier
> to find the right options in a list of two dozen or so.

I think having sections in the options help listing would make sense.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>