Call for testing of colocated branch support in bzr.dev

[Gordon Tyler]

On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 1:08 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org>wrote:

> One thing I don't like about bazaar is having to read the whole list
> of "bzr help commands" (wc says 109 lines in bzr 2.4.2) to find an
> infrequently used command to manipulate a commonly used object.
>
> Specifically, in the tag and branch examples, I would expect that in
> most workflows "rmtag" and "rmbranch" are infrequently used, they are
> very easy to describe (would take up only one line in "bzr help tag"),
> trivial to understand, and would be far more discoverable in "bzr help
> tag" than in "bzr help what was that command again?"  Again, while
> people with a *nix background shouldn't have too much trouble guessing
> "RMtag" and "RMbranch", they may not be intuitive to Windows or even
> Mac users, especially non-technical types used to graphical file
> managers.  (True, they'll normally be using a graphical front end to
> bzr, too, but not always, and it's that "not always" case that I'm
> suggesting you consider here.)
>

The "See Also" line in the help for the tag command should list all the
related commands. And there could be "deltag" and "delbranch" aliases.
Aliases shouldn't be shown in the "bzr help commands" output, so it
wouldn't clutter up the list any further.

Something else to consider, although this is somewhat of a departure from
the current scheme, is to have multi-word commands: "bzr tag delete", "bzr
branch rename", etc. First word is a category of commands, second word is
the specific command within that category. "bzr help tag" would list all
the commands in the tag category. "bzr help tag delete" would show the help
for that specific command. "bzr help commands" could either show just a
list of the categories or it could list all the commands but grouped and
indented by category.

Another variation on that would be to keep the commands as they are now,
but categorize them in the help so that "bzr help tag" would list all the
tag related commands and they would be grouped and indented by category in
"bzr help commands".

Ciao,
Gordon
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