"bzr info": More understandable format strings needed

[Tim Penhey]

Branch format: Branch format 6
Repository format: Packs containing knits without subtree support

"Packs containing knits without subtree support" is not too helpful for normal people. "Packs" would be more helpful IMHO.

Not sure what to do about branch formats though.

[Jonathan Lange (jml)]

These strings come straight from Bazaar. If we want to fix them, or provide shorter alternatives, then it's probably a good idea to do it there.

[Tim Penhey (thumper)]

Yes and no. We use the strings to identify the Enum value, but we have full control over what we show to the user.

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

On Wed, 2008-07-16 at 05:54 +0000, Tim Penhey wrote:
> Yes and no. We use the strings to identify the Enum value, but we have
> full control over what we show to the user.

We can still improve the descriptions in the registry to be nicer :)

-Rob
--
GPG key available at: <http://www.robertcollins.net/keys.txt>.

[Jonathan Lange (jml)]

Related to bug 264730 and bug 250160.

[Ian Clatworthy (ian-clatworthy)]

The help descriptions for formats have been recently improved. Please retest in 1.11.

[Samuel Bronson (naesten)]

The branch format descriptions should be supplemented by bzr-readable names, or at the very least be easy to correlate with "bzr help current-formats" or "bzr help other-formats".

[Martin Albisetti (beuno)]

What we should be exposing is "2a", "0.92", etc. It's what we use to talk about formats, and it' what the user needs to use to bzr upgrade --$format.
The current information we're exposing should be downplayed in the UI, since it's really only useful to bzr developers.

[Aaron Bentley (abentley)]

There have been plenty of complaints about the short display in "bzr info", which is why we went with displaying the full info here.

[Martin Albisetti (beuno)]

This is confusing because it's targeted to both bzr and LP, but I was referring to LP, not bzr :)

[Samuel Bronson (naesten)]

Martin: I feel precisely the same way about "bzr info", though! I feel that LP and "bzr info" should both display text that includes the string to pass to "--format" to create something in or convert something to that format.

[Tim Penhey (thumper)]

Since Launchpad is taking the strings directly from Bazaar, I'm going to close the Launchpad task.