On 15 Jul 2009, at 10:34, Ashley Moran wrote:
Hi all
I just re-stumbled across the darcs Rosetta Stone[1]. What I hadn't
noticed before was the section "Recommendations for unification":
• rename get to clone
• rename changes to log
• rename record to commit (DVCS are popular enough now)
• rename rollback to new "repeal"
These changes sound sensible to me. (Plus `darcs uncommit`?) Is
there an active effort to make darcs more consistent with other
DVCSes? Regardless of which came first, git terminology is becoming
ubiquitous. After showing an existing git user darcs, and noticing
his surprise at `darcs annotate -p`, I think there may be a strong
case for a language reform.
Actually one can look at this the other way around. Every time I have
to work with svn, hg, git, it strikes me how difficult is to use them
compared to darcs. They do things in twisted ways, or have unnatural
names for their commands (mostly because they just copied them from
previous systems). Following your argument I'd say there is a strong
case for a language reform in git, hg, svn, ... :P
It would alienate me to see that a very simple and intuitive command
set is butchered down and morphed into something else just to make it
easier for git users not to be surprised. If anyone hopes that this
would attract more git/hg/svn/whatever users to darcs, she's overly
optimistic. None will leave their favorite VCS to move to a little
known system that has a similar command set. Honestly how many git
users switching to mercurial or the other way around do anyone here
know about?
That's not to say I'm against improving the command names. But what I
consider improvement in their case is making them better express what
they do so they're intuitive to use. I do not consider an improvement
mimicking other VCS' commands just because they're more popular.
From the above examples it's clear that darcs annotate -p is
unexpected, even for a darcs user and it should be reconsidered and a
better alternative provided. But as far as commit/log/xyz goes, I'm
not in favor of mimicking other systems just based on their popularity
and the surprised factor of their users.
And a small slip with annotate certainly doesn't call for a "language
reform". It only calls for replacing annotate -p with something better.
The commands should use the words that best describe what they do, not
what others use out of years of habit. I'm really grateful that when
David made darcs not only he did reconsider how the VCS works, he also
did reconsider how we express those actions, instead of mindlessly
copying command names over from CVS/svn.
--
Dan
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