[Gnu-arch-users] Re: Obsoleting abrowse

[Matthieu Moy]

Mikhael Goikhman <address@hidden> writes:

> I will miss abrowse. I think it is good to have a command operating on
> the exact limit, rbrowse does not do this task very well. I would leave
> 2 commands with their specialized syntaxes as-is, even if you unite the
> implementation. 

Actually, that's the point. rbrowse was written from scratch because
jblack found abrowse's code too hard to understand and maintain.
Keeping abrowse as it is means maintaining it, which may ask quite a
lot of work if we change anything to the namespace layer.

I'd also like to actually remove abrowse because it would avoid
beginners asking "shall I use abrowse or rbrowse? What's the
difference? Why are there two commands?".

Last thing: It would decrement $(baz help | grep ':' | wc -l) by one!

> Or maybe add --regexp to "abrowse", I don't know...

Here's my proposal:

1) Add --id-regexp (we already have --patch-regexp to filter on the
   summary field) to rbrowse, make the exact search the default.

2) Rename "rbrowse" to simply "browse"

3) Make "abrowse" and "rbrowse" deprecated aliases for "browse".
   Remove the abrowse code completely.

> [And BTW, I like that you changed rbrowse to
> use consistent 2 spaces for indentation, less crutches for front-ends.]

As a contributor of Xtla, I understand what you mean ;-). Actually,
for a front-end, you may even prefer "--full --no-tree-view".

-- 
Matthieu