On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 11:57:12AM -0400, Richard Lowe wrote:
> Dean Roehrich <Dean.Roehrich at sun.com> writes:
>
> > On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 10:29:56PM -0600, Mark J. Nelson wrote:
> >>
> >> Thanks, James.
> >>
> >> I made sure to hit johnlev; Dean, would you like a personal invitation?
> >
> > I think I got the message :) I've held back because I have no experience
> > with
> > SUNWonbld, and I have no experience with Teamware. I am using Cadmium with
> > a
> > small group of people, and I've given enough feedback over the past few
> > months.
>
> Which is a good point. We never did resolve the possibility for
> command name collision.
>
> We probably want to consider that as a review comment of yours.
Sure, I'll state my case again.
We should change all cadmium names to have a wx prefix:
hg wxlist
hg wxrecommit
hg wxnits
All current wx users will recognize the names, and they'll recognize the
meaning of the wx prefix. The common prefix means all cadmium commands will
be next to each other when someone types 'hg -h', so all wx users will be able
to easily see the complete set of their good-old wx commands.
The prefix means we are unlikely to ever have a name collision when upgrading
to a Mercurial that has integrated new commands. In particular, I see 'list',
'apply', and 'backup' as name collisions waiting to happen.
The 'wx' means these commands will be at the end of the command list printed
by 'hg -h' (sure, unless there's a future explosion of commands in the x, y,
and z area). That means they will be seen everytime someone types 'hg -h'...
because everything else will have scrolled off the screen, and no one will
think they have to pipe a help listing through a pager.
The prefix also means our users will realize these commands are part of a
Sun-supplied extension. Today, most users will not know which commands are
shipped with Mercurial and which were added by cadmium.
Imagine telling people, "type `hg help cdm`", when they will _never_ have a
reason to know and to remember what cdm or "Cadmimum" means or how it relates
to the commands they want (because 'cdm' is not a command they will ever use).
They will have a hard time remembering that 'cdm' is the thing they need to
type after 'help'.
This proposal takes us very close to never having to type 'hg help cdm', so
there's a new problem: No one will get the genuinely helpful list of "Common
uses" at the top of that help text. Perhaps at the end of the help for each
cdm command, there could be a note about 'hg help cdm'...however, see my
argument above about people never knowing what 'cdm' means or why they should
be interested in looking at its help text. So I don't have a solution for
this one; maybe it was never important anyway.
As for typing two extra chars, I personally think this is important enough to
justify those keystrokes.
Add the prefix. Make these commands easy to find and easy to recognize.
Dean
