Am Freitag, 5. Juni 2009 01:33:02 schrieb Ruediger Oertel:
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.
I completely agree to this, but the problem was that the old commands were inconsistent and blocking namespaces which could be used to make the interface better. Right now, I have no idea how to design the commands with keeping the old syntax and have a new working one. The suggestion of "osc rq submit" for the old "osc sr create" is possible, but I hope you agree that a simple "osc sr" for the same task would be much nicer. Also haveing "osc sr delete" and "osc rq delete" doing something complete different would create some problems. In most cases the osc is telling the user how it should be used now. The case where I have no idea how to do this is the sr creation. At least not without having a disadvantage for all future in the interface. Just a list of all incompatible changes done this time so far, they were done within the last month by multiple contributors trying to improve the interface: osc submitreq create -> osc submitreq osc submitreq accept/decline/show/revoke -> osc request accept/... osc submitreq delete -> osc request wipe osc deletepac -> osc delete or osc rdelete osc deleteprj -> osc rdelete osc rlog -> osc log osc rprjresults -> osc prjresults osc rresults -> osc results osc req -> osc api
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.
Yes, it is not nice to force people to relearn again (and I agreed to that already in the original mail). It is just the lack of ideas how to avoid a permanent drawback for the entire future. It would be of course better if everything would be right from the beginning, but you know that one sometimes need a version 2...
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 ... ;)
thanks ! adrian
(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 ?
-- Adrian Schroeter SUSE Linux Products GmbH email: adrian@suse.de -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-buildservice+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-buildservice+help@opensuse.org