Improving dt's UI

[David Wolever]

(sorry about the delayed reply -- I've been offline the last couple  
days)

On 30-Jun-08, at 12:48 AM, Vlad Skvortsov wrote:
> I've applied the patch and tried that out just now. While I found  
> it quite convenient actually, that reminded me of why we went the  
> menu direction in the first place. The version set (e.g. available  
> versions for an issue) depends on the category. Several categories  
> can each have its own version set (and it can be quite long).
Yea, I couldn't think of a good way of solving that.
I don't know how people in general use it, but I've found that (with  
issue tracking in general) I rarely use more than one or two  
categories, so the hope was that it was "probably better than nothing".

> We could put all possible versions to the issue template, but it  
> seems to defeat the purpose of simplifying the UI. ;-)
heh yes :)

>> 0) Shell aliases don't work everywhere (eg, when I use `:!...`  
>> from Vim, aliases don't work)
>> 1) They aren't standard -- when I go to my friend's machine, he  
>> doesn't have my aliases, so he either has to type a lot more  
>> (using the internal commands) or duplicate my aliases.
>> 2) It's not very standard to require long commands for common  
>> actions.  For example, adding, moving, removing and copying are  
>> all separate commands in svn -- it doesn't use something like `svn  
>> shell --command=mv` (the exception, of course, is `propset`, but  
>> it's got `propedit` too, so it's not TOO bad)
> The points you are making are valid and I agree the aliases  
> approach has drawbacks you mention. Ok, so what actions would you  
> propose to promote to commands? Let's discuss that on case-by-case  
> basis. :-)

Ok, sounds good.

So, if I had my way, these commands would be added:
- close: accepts --fixed, --invalid or --dropped (but defaults to -- 
fixed)
- ed: edit a ticket, including all the headers and the body
- sh: open a shell which DT commands can be executed from.
For example:
$ dt sh
 > ls
1 open Fix the widget
2 closed Link foo to bar
 > new
... create a new ticket ...
 > close 1
... go through the steps of closing ...
Where each of the commands is identical to running `dt $cmd` from the  
shell.
(I'd like this because my poor mac takes a second or two to start up,  
and it's really frustrating when I've got to run two or three  
commands in sequence).

So that is the list of things that I would find useful.

What do you think?