On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 09:18:10AM -0400, C. Michael Pilato wrote:
> Stefan Sperling wrote:
> > And while I agree that adding too many aliases for commands can
> > lead to a confusing UI in the long term, I don't think that it
> > will cause confusion in this particular case.
>
> Let's face the facts, here: most of our commands have aliases for one of
> two reasons:
>
> * To match the name/alias of the similar CVS subcommand
> * To provide a shorter thing to type for especially long subcommands
OK. I don't think these reasons are documented anywhere, but they
sound sane. I thought we had aliases primarily so Subversion can be
used intuitively from the command line (e.g. "svn mv" and "svn ren"
match renaming commands from different operating systems).
> This change matches neither criteria. CVS has no property setting
> functionality, and our property commands already have short aliases. That
> one guy has a problem remembering the subcommand name is just too bad for
> that one guy -- clearly this problem hasn't plagued others over the past six
> years (or at least enough for them to complain about it).
Well, lack of reports does not necessary imply that no one else
ever hits this problem, but we can hardly collect data on this.
> It's not as if
> 'svn help' is hard to type; it's not as if the world ends if you pick a
> bogus subcommand name.
Heh, we do indeed have much bigger usability issues than this
particular one, yes :)
> So, while sanity compels me to tell you to drop this patch and discussion,
s/sanity/the reasons you stated why aliases exist/ ?
> I'm willing to give some ground here: I'm fine with you adding the
> longest-form aliases here (delprop, editprop, etc.), but not the medium- or
> small-sized ones.
Which is exactly what that one guy wanted, so that's enough ground
to make him happy :)
I added the shorter aliases in my patch for two reasons:
1. Consistency.
2. To prevent some future command from using an alias matching
them, to avoid ambiguity.
I don't care to much about them, though.
Stefan
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Received on 2008-08-23 16:32:28 CEST