New feature for 1.26 (master), $(JUJU_HOME)/aliases

[Tim Penhey]

On 24/10/15 00:40, Rick Harding wrote:
> 
> 
> On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 12:12 AM Tim Penhey <tim.penhey at canonical.com
> <mailto:tim.penhey at canonical.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Hi folks,
> 
>     Firstly, the ability to specify default flags for commands:
>       status = status --format=tabular
> 
>     I could never remember the right environment variable to set to get
>     tabular by default.
> 
>     The second was to allow quicker iteration around playing with new CLI
>     structure.  As most people are aware, the 2.0 CLI is going to be
>     somewhat different to the current one, and I thought it would be good to
>     provide a way in which we could "test drive" the new CLI with the
>     existing codebase without having to actually code anything.
> 
> 
> This is very cool Tim. I would like to raise a word of caution though.
> When folks get aliasing too much to work around pain points of the
> experience it makes it easy to hide the pain and not raise it up and
> deal with it.  My one hesitation here is that we need to make sure that
> these are small and that if we find common ones that we bring them up as
> things that should be fixed in the cli vs "just use the following
> aliases" in reply to folks frustrations. 
> 
> In particular, with the 2.0 cli experiments, it'd be helpful if there
> was some method that everyone could be using a shared experience so that
> we were getting real testing of a common plan for a 2.0 cli vs everyone
> building their own 2.0 as they go. 
> 
> Not to be negative on the cool handy feature, but something to think
> about as folks go adding their aliases. 

I agree that we should take care when talking more about aliases.

If we find that there are a set that people generally like using, we
should consider making it more a core part of Juju, and not rely on aliases.

Aliases are useful for some people for some tasks. I don't think they
will be used by everyone, nor or are they supposed to be.

Tim