Re: [BuildStream] bst CLI design and consistency (UI)

[Jürg Billeter <j bitron ch>]

Hi Chandan,

On Fri, 2018-12-07 at 18:53 +0000, Chandan Singh wrote:
> A couple of questions to decide before we can proceed with this:
>
> 1. Click commands can be marked as "hidden", which will hide them from the help
>    text output. But, this feature is only available since Click 7.0 that was
>    released in September earlier this year. Are we okay with declaring
>    Click 7.0 as a minimum requirement?

As click is a pure Python dependency, I don't see an issue with this.

>    If we were to do this, _frontend/cli.py would look something like what I've
>    done in this commit:
>    https://gitlab.com/BuildStream/buildstream/commit/4502a6d94193918655299fcd4be12acc0e8987d0

I think we should use the word 'obsolete' instead of 'deprecated', as
'deprecated' would indicate that it still works, as I understand the
terms.

> 2. Reg. old top-level names, seems like we have a few options:
>
>    a. Mark them as aliases of new commands, but print a deprecation warning
>    b. Provide an error message referring to use the new command
>
>    Keeping in mind that there are other CLI changes that are happening in this
>    release (like workspace rework, artifact etc.), it would make sense to
>    pick one approach and stick to it. So, which one do people prefer?
>
>    I am leaning towards 2b as it attempts to teach users the new behavior
>    rather than fixing it from them, and has lower burden on the mainteiners,
>    but I don't really have strong opinions either way.

2b sounds fine to me but I also don't really have a strong opinion
either way.

Cheers,
Jürg