[RFC] bzr whatnow: Inline help on workflows

[Jerome Leclanche]

Hi all

One of the problems that often come up when I help people switch to Bazaar
is the workflow. I don't know them all myself and cannot always be of help.
The modularity of Bazaar sometimes makes the job even more confusing for the
end user.

This morning it struck me that Bazaar doesn't actually have any kind of
inline help on Workflows. http://bazaar-vcs.org/Workflows is great, but
requires an internet connection, and you can't always find your way into it;
particularly if you are not used to a specific workflow.

My proposal is to add a command, either in bzr or bzrtools, that will query
the current environment and provide inline help on the user's workflow
depending on local changes, so on. Look at it like a "What should I do
now?". Example:

Sample use case:
 adys$~/myproject: bzr whatnow
 You are on a *centralized partner* workflow. You currently have
no uncommitted changes, but your 6 most recent commits have not been
pushed. Once you are done, you should *push your changes* with *bzr push*.

Setting up the workflow is done on first whatnow run in a project, or with a
command such as bzr whatnow --setworkflow. This should pop up a list of
workflows with a one-line description:
 adys$~/myproject: bzr whatnow
 No workflow has been set.
 Choose which description fits your current workflow best:
 [1] solo: I am alone on this project, tracking changes locally.
 [2] partner: ...

As a sidenote, it would be great to have bzr help workflows, with a possibly
exhaustive description on, for example, bzr help workflows
centralized-partner, etc.

I'd love to hear some more people's opinions with this. I'm also very
tempted to work on it but definitely won't be able to finish it alone; I
don't know the bzr codebase but I'll have a look in a couple of days.
I also realize this may not be entirely doable by only querying the local
environment. In which case it could query the remote environment, or even
ask the user for what they want.

Thanks!

-- 
J. Leclanche / Adys
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