[RFC][PATCH] support for aliases in bazaar.conf

[Martin Pool]

On 10 Feb 2006, John A Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> wrote:
> Your 'aliases' also seem to affect the same things that Aaron's defaults
> affect. They at least are trying to solve the same problem. So I would
> like to understand the differences. And have a discussion about the
> tradeoffs.
> 
> I don't think we want to have both defaults and aliases. Since otherwise
> scripting interfaces would need something like 'bzr --no-aliases
> --no-defaults status'.
> 
> I think we might want a bigger knob or perhaps just expand --builtins to
> disable all non-default behavior. I'm not sure if it should disable
> plugins (right now the thought is that plugins can provide extra
> transports, so while we don't want to use overwritten commands, we do
> want to use the extra transports).

I think --builtin means "look this up as a builtin command", so it
doesn't disable other things that might be loaded by plugins such as
transports, branch formats, or formatters.  One use for this is commands
implemented as shell scripts, which might want to fiddle with the
options and then run the underlying builtin command.  (That particular
use would be obsoleted by options, though we shouldn't break any
existing scripts.)

We can ask what use cases are needed.  They seem to be:

 * Disable plugins altogether, perhaps because of suspicion that they're
   causing a problem.  Presumably this would want to disable aliases
   too?

 * Shell scripts that want "reproducible" behaviour, rather than user 
   shortcuts.  So they probably wouldn't want command aliases or 
   different output formats, but *would* want to support all available
   transports or branch formats.  Perhaps this should be wrapped up
   in a --batch option.

 * A shell plugin that wants to run the underlying builtin

 * ...?

> Anyway, the idea of aliases is nice, and it seems a little bit more
> flexible than defaults. Though do you allow overriding a command with an
> alias?
> [ALIASES]
> log = log -r -10..-1

If we did this, it would seem to be a proper superset of what you can do
with default options.  Aaron, would you be OK to use this instead?

-- 
Martin
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