Call for discussion: Phase names

[Jason Harris]

On Jan 18, 2012, at 12:34 AM, Olle wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 21:43, Angel Ezquerra <ezquerra at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>> Must the short options be the first letter of the long option?
>> 
>> If not, what about using the first vowel, which is different for each of the
>> phase names and also is easy to remember?
>> 
>> That is:
>> 
>> --public: -u
>> --draft: -a
>> --private: -I
> Ugh, that's horrible. I would rather see that mercurial kept the
> secret name and provided short options. I'm an avid user of short
> options and having long options will cost me infinitely more time than
> explaining that secret = private for anyone that ponders the
> semantics.

Infinitely more time? :)

> Hell, I'd even prefer using public < draft < own as a
> replacement for public <draft < private if i get to keep the short
> options.

I don't get it. If people are worried about the short form typing speed then
it's trivial to set up an alias in their hgrc file like:

[alias]
phasep = phase --private

or if one is obsessed with masochistic shortness then maybe even:

pp = phase --private

(Note also `phase --pr ...` will also work but of course that is two characters
longer than `phase -p ...` and so for savings of "infinite time" it might be better to
have an alias :) )

(Note probably this point is mute anyway since hopefully we won't have to make
this step manually a lot. Or for the heavy command line users, they will likely
just bake the phase change command into their own commands. Eg if one needs to
do `hg phase --private ...;  hg rebase ...` a lot then likely the command line
user will add some command like hg rebasep ... or maybe hg prebase ... etc.
Then the users can save double infinite time :)

Cheers,
   Jason