Dear Mercurial People, I don't use Mercurial or know much about it. Every once in a while I think to myself "I should learn about Mercurial", and I start reading the man page and scroll down until I see "add" ... "addremove" ... "annotate" ... "archive" ... and then I give up...
I realize that alphabetizing stuff has a venerable pedigree: the cvs(1) man page alphabetizes subcommands, and even global flags. For me it just doesn't make sense - we read the documentation on digital devices, and when we want to find a particular word we use a search feature, rather than bisecting the alphabet. It would be kinder to new users, without which no project could survive, to put things in a sensible order for learning purposes. I feel it is unfortunate that many projects list concepts in alphabetical order. This has the appearance of being organized but really is just uninformative. I realize that many people learn first from tutorials rather than manual pages. I feel that even when tutorials are available, it is still helpful to have a canonical reference document, which should be sensibly organized, to which one can refer while following the tutorial, and which is useful for further study afterwards. By the way, I've been trying to work with the Git maintainers to de-alphabetize the subcommand listing in the git(1) manual page. They didn't want to do it themselves; so I ended up skimming all 150+ subcommand pages and coming up with an ordering of my own, and sending a patch. Now the patch seems to be languishing... I mention this in case someone has the idea of asking me to do the same thing for Mercurial. I'm not offering to do that; I'm just offering my perspective as a prospective user. I'm not subscribed to the mailing list, so please Cc me if you have any questions. Thank you, Frederick _______________________________________________ Mercurial mailing list [email protected] https://www.mercurial-scm.org/mailman/listinfo/mercurial
