Re: [Gnu-arch-users] distringuished branches, Re: distinguished branch name, "clone"

[Thomas Zander]

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On Sunday 09 November 2003 23:59, Miles Bader wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 09, 2003 at 05:01:40PM +0100, address@hidden wrote:
> > If I had to write down what parts a fully-specified archive name was
> > build up from, I can't do it.  I'm pretty sure most people here either
> > took quite some time to learn it, or can't do it either.
>
> I think you must be exaggerating, becuase archive names, while rather
> long, are very simple in structure -- they're just EMAIL--STRING, where
> it's recommended that STRING contain a date.  At least, I hope you're
> exaggerating...

Yeah, ok.  But in my defense I was talking about the full name:
tla get -A address@hidden myProject--myBranch--0.1


> > Second is that tla invented a whole new way of sending commands to the
> > application.  Where most applications use '-o'/'--original' kind of
> > commands tla aims for more readable ones like 'use-original'.
> > While this enhances readability it has some problems.
>
> You mean the tla sub-command names?!?  The way tla does it is basically
> _traditional_ for such tools (see e.g. cvs).

Hmm; the above came out a bit more negative then it is intended. The email 
was meant to compare tla's long naming convention to the gnu standard which 
has the single dash and the double dash convention.
type 'ls --help' for a list to see what I mean.

> > Humans are really good at pattern matching; so 'tla add-tag' is
> > immidiately recognized as being the same as 'tla add', but humans have
> > a really big problem doing it the other way around.
> > In the end users will have to memorize the argument-names of tla to be
> > able to use tla.
>
> It's very unclear what you're complaining about here.
>
> You seem to be arguing that having multiple `long' names for the same
> command for the same concept is `hard', but that using single-letter
> abbreviations is `easy,' which seems absurd...

I was arguing that the single/double dash gnu standard uses terse as well as 
long commands, but never more then one word, and that with human psychology 
it can be proven that those are easier to remember.
It certainly is not 'absurd'. I can personally attest that I type 
'tla help | grep bla' more often then any other tla command.

To conclude; the single word or even single character standard from the gnu 
c-libraries display that the multi-word and nicely formatted naming tla 
uses now is far from the unix standard; and my explenation above tells you 
_why_ it is worse.
I'm not saying that we should convert things like an 'tla file-find' to a 
'tla -f', but it is perhaps very much needed to provide single word 
abbreviations that are clear to unix users.
The tla rm is indeed a good step forward.

- -- 
Thomas Zander
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