Restructuring ubuntu-dev-tools?

[Martin Pool]

On 12 March 2011 00:04, Barry Warsaw <barry at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Jan 27, 2011, at 01:19 PM, Martin Pool wrote:
>
>>By "people in general" I mean it doesn't need to include things that
>>are only for Ubuntu developers, or that scratch particular personal
>>itches.  But there are some very common things like adding a person to
>>a team or changing bug state or listing bugs that are pretty much
>>policy-free.  At the moment they are spread across a bunch of
>>different client tools, and therefore are needlessly inconsistent,
>>hard to find, and duplicative.
>
> While these tools are really great, discoverability is a big problem.  I
> wonder if it would make sense to bring the most useful ones under a common top
> level command, a la bzr, svn, and so on.  When written in Python, argparse
> provides very nice support for subcommand definitions.  For example, Mailman 3
> includes a top level 'mailman' command with subcommands for starting/stopping
> the processor, creating lists, etc.
>
> I'm not sure there's enough commonality to justify it, but I'm throwing it out
> there anyway. ;)

I think that would make a huge amount of sense.  The openSUSE build
service has a command-line tool documented within their main web
site[1], as an alternative to the web ui.  I would like to eventually
get to a similar state with Launchpad.  (The tools are not perfect
parallels but it gives a good idea of what's possible.)

[1] http://en.opensuse.org//openSUSE:Build_Service_Tutorial

For developer-oriented tools I think having a full command line
interface would very nicely complement the web, web api, and email
interfaces.

I hope to get lptools to gradually move towards this.

Martin