On Apr 11, 2014, at 05:21, Jan Stary wrote: > Are you even serious? If you can't be bothered > to remember the seven or so command names, > just write yourself some shell wrapper > around calling them something else, > as opposed to imposing needless cruft upon others.
I’m grateful to René for suggesting possible improvements to MacPorts. I’m not opposed to adding command aliases to MacPorts to make it easier to remember how to do things for users more familiar with other package managers. I just don’t use other package managers, so I don’t know what some of those aliases might be; someone would have to propose them. We used to have some aliases for shorter commands (e.g. “ed” for “edit”) until we implemented a feature that let you use any unique shorter version of a command and removed those specific aliases. But I would guess it wouldn’t be hard to add other aliases into MacPorts base. I’ve previously proposed that we could try to unify some commands that have similar purposes; the many different types of list output that MacPorts can currently produce (via commands like installed, echo, list, search) could be consolidated into just one or two formats, which would reduce the confusion we currently have where commands like “port list installed” don’t do what most users think it would do: https://trac.macports.org/wiki/FAQ#portlist Another improvement I would like to see is more leniency in where flags can be specified. Currently, MacPorts uses single-character options preceded by a single dash as global options that apply to any command, and they must be specified between “port” and the command verb, whereas multi-character options preceded by two dashes are command-specific options and must appear after the command verb. I often see tickets filed where users have put the flags in the wrong place, and MacPorts just silently ignores them. I point to the Subversion command line client svn as an example of how it could be done better (it accepts most arguments of most commands in any order). Meanwhile, until such changes are made, setting up aliases and functions in a shell startup file is a possibility users can pursue. I have a collection of additional commands that I find useful; perhaps I should publish them as a contrib script that can be sourced by shell startup files. _______________________________________________ macports-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-users
