-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Jul 23, 2007, at 4:05 PM, Tres Seaver wrote:
Barry Warsaw wrote:
On Jul 23, 2007, at 1:40 PM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
At 12:46 PM 7/23/2007 -0400, Barry Warsaw wrote:
Under that principle, can I renew my plea for a better name than "easy_install"? Do you have a specific name in mind?
I knew you were going to ask that. :) My first requirement is "something without an underscore".
Why? That has to be a pure "de gustibus" argument AFAICT.
It's not. Few *nix commands use underscores, and for good reason. It's user unfriendly because it's on an uncommon keycap you have to search for *and* you have to shift to it. And by "you" I don't mean you and me (i.e. programmers) who type the silly things all day, I mean "users". Sometimes hyphens are used (e.g. 'apt-get') which is only slightly better but those are still rare. And this recommendation says (to me) that utility names should be between 2 and 9 characters and be composed of lower case letters and digits: http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/ xbd_chap12.html#tag_12_02
My second would be "something that's evocative of snakes and eggs".
You prefer cute, rather than self-explanatory?
I prefer something memorable and easy to type. BTW, it's only a claim that 'easy_install' is actually 'easy' -- a claim I happen to agree with, mostly, but it's more hopefully self-explanatory than objectively so.
I'd further recommend that Python itself come with an 'egg(1)' command, which should be a shortcut for 'python setup.py'. To be honest, the latter is not as user friendly as 'egg sdist bdist_egg upload -s' but if the two use cases conflict too much, then egg(1) should be reserved for the end user because developers can swallow the slight inconvenience more easily.
Why would a *command* invoke setup.py? I don't see the point: peopple who want that kind of convenience can write two-liner shell scripts, spelled the way they like, or even put an alias in their shell profile.
Of course, and developers who dislike the verbosity are well equipped to do any kind of aliasing they want. I'm not going to belabor this point because it's not the use case I /really/ care about and I don't want to sidetrack the discussion about coming up with a better command than 'easy_install' for users. - -Barry -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (Darwin) iQCVAwUBRqURj3EjvBPtnXfVAQIFrgP/XbBgGxLLgKyIMCVeyXLsRArL2IrocLKn Uu5lykvaunN5Q6UgqJM9JzOvHldbd2Igs0hugNnGXOWOzEUUJITASgPkcetTmwAs 1eot2oa6ZAbHLo1bgntBPW9HLAK7mZES7/Py8VwSnksubCX03aCu4mR4WnCCfM+H ssFW37aEwDU= =M/XJ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----