Re: Collection of stgit issues and wishes

From: Karl Hasselström <kha@treskal.com>
Date: Dec 13, 2006, 11:03 UTC
Message-ID: <20061213110314.GA22670@diana.vm.bytemark.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <457FD3E4.3090104@op5.se>

On 2006-12-13 11:20:20 +0100, Andreas Ericsson wrote:

Show 23 quoted lines

> David Kågedal wrote:
>
> > "Catalin Marinas" <catalin.marinas@gmail.com> writes:
> >
> > > On 08/12/06, Yann Dirson <ydirson@altern.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > > - shortcuts (st -> status, etc.), possibly making use of the
> > > >   git alias system ?
> > >
> > > Did this last night as it was pretty easy and without the GIT
> > > alias system (which I am not familiar with). The idea is that if
> > > it cannot find an exact match, it tries to look for all the
> > > commands starting with the passed argument. If more than one
> > > command is found, it reports an "ambiguous command".
> >
> > That approach can cause problems later on. If "stgit st" is
> > currently a unique prefix of "stgit status", people might use it
> > in scripts. Then, one day, you add the "stgit store" command, or
> > whatever, and their scripts start breaking for no good reason.
>
> People who use abbreviations of commands in scripts ought to be
> shot, not catered to, especially if they know this abbreviation is
> automagically calculated.

Well, yes, but there's no reason to not shoot them _politely_ ...

I'd prefer hand-picked command abbreviations to reduce namespace clutter. That way, it's even possible to have "ambiguous" shortcuts -- for example, "stg st" -> "stg status" even if "stg store" exists. And shortcuts that aren't prefixes, like "stg ua" -> "stg unapplied". And the user doesn't need to retrain her fingers just because a prefix gets ambiguous.

For prefixes, tab completion is a much better answer.

-- 
Karl Hasselström, kha@treskal.com