Re: [Gnu-arch-users] distringuished branches, Re: distinguished branch name, "clone"

[zander]

On Sun, Nov 09, 2003 at 07:37:09AM -0800, Tom Lord wrote:
> In other words, I think that some of the verbosity in arch compared to
> what you might expect is simply the result that when using arch, you
> tend to be trying to do fancier things with more parameters to choose
> from.

Its not that simple;
I encountered 2 problems while working with tla.
The naming of an archive is not something I can 'understand'. Its too
verbose (tla get is way to hard for me to do without copy-paste).
If I had to write down what parts a fully-specified archive name was
build up from, I can't do it.  I'm pretty sure most people here either
took quite some time to learn it, or can't do it either.


Second is that tla invented a whole new way of sending commands to the
application.  Where most applications use '-o'/'--original' kind of
commands tla aims for more readable ones like 'use-original'.
While this enhances readability it has some problems.

Humans are really good at pattern matching; so 'tla add-tag' is immidiately
recognized as being the same as 'tla add', but humans have a really big
problem doing it the other way around.
In the end users will have to memorize the argument-names of tla to be able
to use tla.

Different people memorize things differently;
Using a name like 'file-find' may seem logical to you, but to me it seems it
should be the other wrong way around, I have to make a mental note that
file-find was different from what I would normally do.
This, as well as the add and add-tag command confusion creates the problem that
I will keep choosing the wrong one even after months;  writing down a word
is very different from recognizing it.

I think that makes the gnu way of argument parsing so nice is that for
different people different ways of remembering can be used.  I always use
the '-[char]' version since I like that and I have a pretty good memory for
remembering abstract stuff.
Friends of mine always type things like 'ls --recursive' since they remember
with mental-refrences of original concept, and can't remember if it was -R
or -r...

Note that humans don't remember the literal string in case they can make a
connection to something they already know, humans just are not wired like
that.

-- 
Thomas Zander