Just to clear up some confusion. The issues I initially had with
fossil were due to a misunderstanding about how fossil works. An
issue is that clicking the help button in the fossil UI gives a
wall of commands. That is fine if you already understand the
concept of the base operations and just need a quick syntax
reference. But when trying to learn fossil from scratch,
confusion sets in when looking at most of the commands without
an understanding of why/when/should it be used. As it turns out,
most of the commands are not used on a normal basis which just
confuses a newbie without knowing what is/not important.
I think the documentation should group the most commonly used
commands from the master list. Maybe make several groups
presented in most-used to rarely-used groupings. A primer should
avoid permuting the possible operations until later (it just
adds to the confusion) and focus on a complete real example with
the concepts explained as though the reader is seeing it for the
very first time.
Regarding my command line comment. Originally I misinterpreted
how fossil works. Here is how I thought it worked based on the
explanations how to use it. (Note this was my original
interpretation and have since figured out how it really works).
It seemed as though fossil was basically a ticket/wiki database
that had a fancy way of zipping groups of files together.
Without understanding the concept how it works, I derived that
clone basically sent a zipped package of files, you work on the
files, then zip them back up and then someone manually has to
conditionally decide what to merge back into the main
repository. That is what I derived from the documentation. As
such I initially saw fossil as a burden to use that did not
really add any value to my workflow.
I was not aware that doing a commit or sync automatically
updated the main repository. That should be the very first topic
of discussion in the documentation (with a better explanation
and example). The documentation seems to imply that only the
local copy is modified, which is why I was confused about the
server command line issue. I was trying to figure out how
changes to my local copy made it back into the main copy on the
server. The command line I was referring to was the command line
on the server not the local workstation. The documentation seems
to read as though to get the local copy back into the main
repository requires a bunch of commands need to be executed on
the server command line.
The documentation needs a newbie primer that better explains how
commits and syncing works. I now mostly figured it out, but was
initially discouraged because of the seemingly (incorrect)
concept of operation for syncing with the main repository.
A problem with most manuals for many software products is that
an assumption is made that the reader already understands the
concept of operation. If the reader is confuzzled at the start,
then explanations of the commands do not absorb without an
understanding why it is being done.
-------------------------
Scott Doctor
sc...@scottdoctor.com
-------------------------
On 10/24/2016 08:18, Warren Young wrote:
On Oct 22, 2016, at 4:40 PM, Scott Doctor <sc...@scottdoctor.com> wrote:
How do they do such over the internet without having command line access?
Are you actually saying that your fellow researchers don’t have access to the
command line on their own workstations?
I do understand that some managed PC installations do try to turn off the local
OS command terminal. An IT industry columnist I follow calls such people the
Value Prevention Society, because they frequently take actions to remove the
value we should expect to get from user-owned PCs over mainframes and such.
If you actually do find yourself operating in such a benighted environment, you
could build a GUI wrapper program around the fossil.exe binary. I’m not
talking about anything grandiose; maybe half a day of time in your favorite GUI
builder. You could do this in anything from VB to Tcl/Tk to HTML Applications.
You could probably even do it in FileMaker. :)
(Yes, I’m making a leap here that you’re using Windows. Organizations that
allow use of other OSes generally don’t even *try* to lock their users out of
the local command line.)
Seems adding files, doing check-ins, merges, should all be part of the UI.
Someone has to do it. Patches will be thoughtfully reviewed. :)
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