On Friday 05 June 2009 00:25:13 Marcus Rueckert wrote:
On 2009-06-04 14:40:02 -0600, Boyd Lynn Gerber wrote:
+1, I think if we are going to make changes now is the time to do it for both osc and the UI. We need to get it right now. I like what has been proposed.
osc is an user interface. user interface doesnt always mean "graphical". and the whole discussion was about osc not about the webclient or anything. and for a cmdline tool the important part are stable cmdline params/subcommands.
well, I'd second that. Not that I like any of the osc cmdline syntax particularly ;) but at least I have my most common commands easily at hand after quite a while now, and I'd guess others have similarly invested time to find out ways to do the tasks they want to accomplish and how to express that with osc. Extending the interface by new methods (options, arguments, ...) is perfectly fine but I'd really ask to keep the current ones working for quite a while(1) probably with some reminder for the (updated/changed) new syntax, at best with a reminder that gives me a cut'n'paste full expansion of how to write my "oldish" command in a current way with all arguments already in place. There is always a learning curve when people start to do things and I think we agree that we want more people to use the buildservice and it's tools like osc. Changing some of the most common commands (and I think the submitreq is part of that set) will push many people back to the start of that curve. By abandoning interfaces now, the user will get the impression: "this worked yesterday but does not any longer, something is broken ...". After all we should not forget that for most users of the buildservice, the buildservice itself is just a method to get work done (change code, look at diffs, submit changes,...) and they don't really want to care about the technology or cleanlyness of a commandline interface. There are vaild reasons and technical neccessities to add and extend the interface, but up to now I don't see the reason to break things. just my 2 cents since you asked for comments ... ;) (1) thinking about it: would it be possible to hack up some statistic in the api to see which commands/variants are used frequently to get an idea when some possibly outdated interface is really "almost" not used anymore ? -- with kind regards (mit freundlichem Grinsen), Ruediger Oertel (ro@novell.com,ro@suse.de,bugfinder@t-online.de) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Linux MacBookRudi 2.6.30-rc6-git3-4-default #1 SMP 2009-05-25 14:11:59 +0200 x86_64 Key fingerprint = 17DC 6553 86A7 384B 53C5 CA5C 3CE4 F2E7 23F2 B417 SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-buildservice+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-buildservice+help@opensuse.org