making bk less intimidating

  from the perspective of a newbie, here are some of the things i've
been thinking about (some of which have been mentioned before, but i
figured i'd put it all in one place).

  first (as i posted recently), it would be nice if there was some
consistency for global bk options.  for instance, the confusion
between "-r" versus "-R", the default for that, etc.  i would think it
would reduce confusion if all commands had common semantics regarding
their starting location, and whether or not they work recursively.
but i've flogged that horse before, so i'll move on.

  regarding "bk helptool", the first time one runs it, it's seriously
intimidating, but it turns out that that intimidation is somewhat
bogus.  if you look under the "Alphabetical" list, a lot of what's
under there don't correspond to actual bk commands -- things like the
first few entries, bkcl, bkl, openlogging, diff, gpl, patch and so on.
i think it would be helpful to have an alphabetical list of *just*
commands, and perhaps another subsection for "concepts", or something
like that.  it is a bit of a shock to open helptool for the first time
and see what looks like 100 different subcommands, only to find out
later that it's not really that bad.  but still, that first impression
can be painful.

  and on the subject of actual commands in helptool, there's a
definite inconsistency in which commands are listed there and which
aren't.  some of the "commands" are little more than one or two line
shorthands for other commands.  take, for example, "bk extras".  it's
not much more than a call to "bk sfiles", yet it's listed in helptool.

  OTOH, when i went looking for something equivalent to a "re-edit", i
didn't see anything in helptool, but larry pointed me to bk.script and
the function (you guessed it) "_reedit".  it's not at all clear why
one would be listed in helptool and not the other, or whether *either*
of them should be there.  it may be that it would make more sense to
have helptool have entries for the basic commands, and perhaps another
section for "shortcuts" like reedit and extras.  perhaps even two
separate files -- bk.scripts and bk.shortcuts, or something like that.
i realize it's pretty arbitrary where one might draw the line, but as
it is, this leaves open the possibility of a *lot* of functions being
added to bk.script that never show up in helptool.

  next, and related to the above, what about a mechanism for adding
extra shortcuts to one's environment.  perhaps with a personal config
file, perhaps with an env variable.  ideally, there should be a way to
automatically add new functions to one's environment rather than
hacking bk.script.  in my case, i wanted to be able to generate a list
of files that would be modified by the next "bk pull", so i created
the function "incoming()" which is implemented as (from memory):

  bk changes -R -nd':GFILE:' | sort -u     (i think :-)

very handy (at least for me), but i'd rather be able to add shortcuts
like this to my environment without hacking bk.script (i'm assuming
that's the only way to do that at the moment; if it's not, then colour
me embarrassed.)

  and, finally, i did mention the appeal of a "cookbook" kind of doc,
with an explanation of common operations.  but that was just throwing
out ideas.

  thoughts?

rday

_______________________________________________
Bitkeeper-users mailing list
[email protected]
http://bitmover.com/mailman/listinfo/bitkeeper-users
To unsubscribe from this list, go to the above URL, follow instruction at the bottom of the web page.