-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Jul 23, 2007, at 4:05 PM, Tres Seaver wrote:
> Barry Warsaw wrote: >> On Jul 23, 2007, at 1:40 PM, Phillip J. Eby wrote: >> >>> At 12:46 PM 7/23/2007 -0400, Barry Warsaw wrote: >>>> Under that principle, can I renew my plea for a better name than >>>> "easy_install"? >>> Do you have a specific name in mind? >> >> I knew you were going to ask that. :) My first requirement is >> "something without an underscore". > > Why? That has to be a pure "de gustibus" argument AFAICT. It's not. Few *nix commands use underscores, and for good reason. It's user unfriendly because it's on an uncommon keycap you have to search for *and* you have to shift to it. And by "you" I don't mean you and me (i.e. programmers) who type the silly things all day, I mean "users". Sometimes hyphens are used (e.g. 'apt-get') which is only slightly better but those are still rare. And this recommendation says (to me) that utility names should be between 2 and 9 characters and be composed of lower case letters and digits: http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/ xbd_chap12.html#tag_12_02 >> My second would be "something >> that's evocative of snakes and eggs". > > You prefer cute, rather than self-explanatory? I prefer something memorable and easy to type. BTW, it's only a claim that 'easy_install' is actually 'easy' -- a claim I happen to agree with, mostly, but it's more hopefully self-explanatory than objectively so. >> I'd further recommend that Python itself come with an 'egg(1)' >> command, which should be a shortcut for 'python setup.py'. To be >> honest, the latter is not as user friendly as 'egg sdist bdist_egg >> upload -s' but if the two use cases conflict too much, then egg(1) >> should be reserved for the end user because developers can swallow >> the slight inconvenience more easily. > > Why would a *command* invoke setup.py? I don't see the point: > peopple > who want that kind of convenience can write two-liner shell scripts, > spelled the way they like, or even put an alias in their shell > profile. Of course, and developers who dislike the verbosity are well equipped to do any kind of aliasing they want. I'm not going to belabor this point because it's not the use case I /really/ care about and I don't want to sidetrack the discussion about coming up with a better command than 'easy_install' for users. - -Barry -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (Darwin) iQCVAwUBRqURj3EjvBPtnXfVAQIFrgP/XbBgGxLLgKyIMCVeyXLsRArL2IrocLKn Uu5lykvaunN5Q6UgqJM9JzOvHldbd2Igs0hugNnGXOWOzEUUJITASgPkcetTmwAs 1eot2oa6ZAbHLo1bgntBPW9HLAK7mZES7/Py8VwSnksubCX03aCu4mR4WnCCfM+H ssFW37aEwDU= =M/XJ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
