Better name for dpush wanted

[Benjamin Jansen]

On Apr 29, 2009, at 12:28 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Jelmer Vernooij writes:
>
>> bzr core provides "only" 61 visible commands of those 122.
>
> Sure, but people are going to want plugins.  rebase, gtk, and bzrtools
> are all pretty popular, and launchpad will become more so over time.
>
>> I agree that having a lot of commands can be overwhelming to
>> users. I don't see a lot of things that can be removed or would be
>> good candidates for merging though (bzr --no-plugins help
>> commands).
>
> * Dramatic reduction possible for sure:

I don't see how collapsing these commands would result in a better  
interface. On the whole, the existing commands are well named, IMO. I  
find that I use perhaps 10 commands daily. When I've forgotten the  
name of one I rarely use, it is very easy for me to quickly look  
through "bzr help commands" to find what I want. Converting a bunch of  
commands into options on other commands makes that more difficult,  
because the commands become more abstract. I see no net gain in  
comprehensibility.

> conflicts, deleted, ignored, ls, missing, renames -> ls
> alias, nick, plugins, version, whoami -> config
> clone -> <delete>
> bind, checkout, pull, switch, unbind, update -> checkout
> tag, tags -> tag[1]
> init, init-repository -> init[2]
> pull, merge, remerge -> merge[3]
> uncommit, revert -> revert
> info, revno, root, status -> status[4]
>
> * There's gotta be some consolidation possible here:
>
> break-lock, check, clean-tree, ignore, pack, reconcile, reconfigure,
>    remove-tree, split, upgrade, version-info, view -> manage, info
>
> I think you should fairly easily be able to reduce the number of core
> commands to 40, with some effort, 35.
>
> Footnotes:
> [1]  It's actually harmless to have both the singular and plural form
> with the obvious semantics, but it's the principle of the thing.
>
> [2]  Cf. my immediately previous post.
>
> [3]  "pull" is a horrible name for "mirror" semantics.  Mostly it
> belongs in checkout/update, some in merge.

"bzr mirror" would be a good, clear replacement for push/pull. I  
really like the obviousness of "bzr mirror <src> <dest>". However,  
moving mirroring actions into checkout/update or merge would make  
things even less clear than push/pull.

> [4]  "status" is not a great name for the information provided by
> info, but it seems reasonably apt as a switch: "bzr status --branch",
> for example, defaulting to --files.

I agree that "status" is a bad name for what is currently displayed by  
"info" -- so why collapse them? Putting branch details under "status"  
is simply less clear.

- Ben

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