Comment 3 for bug 736001

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On 3/16/2011 1:37 PM, Julian Edwards wrote:
> I understand the need to script. It's trivial to detect if you're running on
> a terminal or not though, and bzr should cope with that.
>
> Or it can even just print out something like:
> "Your repository needs repacking because <hand wave>, run `bzr pack`"
>
> I appreciate you offering the plugin, but I don't think that's a long-term
> solution to usability.
>

If it seriously *regularly* spends 20 minutes repacking, then we have a
serious issue. Any chance you can actually quantify how often it happens?

I actually was proposing the plugin as a way for you to experiment with
it, and see how often bzr actually does repack, without you noticing.

As for "isatty", I would say that in places where we've tried to do
that, we've had many bug reports about incorrect detection. It really
isn't as easy as people seem to think.

Like running in a pipeline, and stderr is still a tty, but stdin isn't,
so you don't actually have a way to respond, etc.

It is something where many commands potentially grow a prompt at a
random time that people don't expect. It is one thing to prompt for
something like "bzr shelve" where that is the expected workflow. But all
update/push/pull/even stuff like 'missing' might trigger a repack. (Not
sure if missing fetches or not).

I agree the plugin isn't a full answer to usability, but you were
complaining about behavior X, but I don't think you realize how often X
actually happens that you don't notice it. That, and the plugin was a
30-min hack that was easy enough to illustrate the point.

John
=:->
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