[tahoe-dev] CLI mkdir inverse?

[Brian Warner]

On Mon, 4 May 2009 20:00:16 -0400
Kevin Reid <kpreid at mac.com> wrote:

> Is there any reason 'tahoe rm foo' shouldn't edit the aliases table?  
> If I understand the model correctly, it would be unambiguous.

"tahoe rm foo:" would be unambigious, since "tahoe rm foo" would really mean
"tahoe rm tahoe:foo", i.e.:

 alias_name = DEFAULT_ALIAS = "tahoe"
 dircap = get_alias_by_name(alias_name)
 parent_dir = get_dirnode(dircap)
 parent_dir.remove_child_by_name("foo")

The clearest reason I can think of to not let "tahoe rm" be used in this
fashion would be to reinforce the user's mental model of aliases and
dirnodes. "rm" removes a child from a parent dirnode. To allow rm to
sometimes remove an alias from the alias table would make it easier for users
to (incorrectly) think that the alias table is like another dirnode, which
would lead them to wonder what it's dircap is and how can they make it
automatically shared between multiple machines.

Hm, maybe we should require that aliases are visibly distinct somehow, like
force them to be all caps. Or, I know, we could force them to be a single
capital letter. We could start with "C:", that looks nice and familiar ;-).

cheers,
 -Brian