[rt-devel] Confusing user interface in commandline rt

[stoffel at lucent.com]

Jesse> Changing the behaviour of the standard commandline tools late
Jesse> in the 2.0.x stable series isn't going to happen. It's not that
Jesse> I don't agree that the CLI is an abomination, but that one of
Jesse> the primary uses of the CLI is noninteractive use by scripts.

As Rich pointed out, isatty(3) is a possible solution to this issue as
well.  

Jesse> The CLI definitely wants to get gutted and redone for the next
Jesse> major release.  I'd be absolutely thrilled to see a concrete
Jesse> proposal or two for how the CLI should work and feel.  If you
Jesse> could redo the CLI from scratch, what would you want to see?

Generally, the CLI setup isn't too bad, I rarely have to do anything
from the Web interface that I can't do from the CLI or via email.  But
there are some short comings that I've run into:

general comments
----------------

- all distructive commands should require -f to force their behavior,
  otherwise they prompt.

- a curses interface would be wonderful!

- there should be an undo available for transactions such as merges.
  This is a core RT issue really.

- If you give an invalid ticket number, it should do better bounds
   checking up front and then error out, instead of trying to do stuff
   with bogus info.  


rtq
--------

- shows all tickets, starting with the oldest to first.  I'd like to
  see it default to the most recent ## tickets.  For example:

     rtq -owner stoffel

  Should only give me my last 10 or so.  Or at least start from the
  newest and work back in time.

- The output of the header should be made *much* more compact.  If
  you're not on a 48 line xterm, it's hard to know which ticket number
  you are looking at.

rt
--------

- the create command is ugly.  It needs to be made more friendly, or
  offer better ways to customize which fields are prompted for.

- Should rt really have the -publichistory switch?  That's an rtq
  function. 


Just my off the cuff thoughts.

John
   John Stoffel - Senior Unix Systems Administrator - Lucent Technologies
	 stoffel at lucent.com - http://www.lucent.com - 978-399-0479