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FAI (The Friendly Arch Interface) 0.2 (aka pyaba)
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Fai is a commandline-based Arch tool with interactive prompting. It aims to be
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a better commandline user interface than tla. By combining functionality
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that is handled as separate commands in tla, it aims to have smaller command
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Quick Start (or "Where's the documentation?")
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Most of the documentation currently available for fai is accessed through
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To see all the available commands:
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To get help on a specific command you, use either of these:
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Also, see the HANDY HINTS below.
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There's also a web site: http://sourcecontrol.net/~abentley/fai/
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But it's focused more on programming Fai than on using it.
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* Compatibility with aba commands
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* Alias expansion (no prefix required for native commands)
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* Automatic aliases; these determine the revision by performing functions
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* tla fallthrough (to be removed when redundant)
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* smart colorizing (which can be turned off)
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* prompts that can be configured to take defaults
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Commands: ('fai help -n' for a full list)
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* get: an improved get that can use URLs and automatically create local
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* revisions: a combination of logs, missing, revisions, cachedrevs, etc.
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--missing-from (which of my revisions are missing from the
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--modified (which revisions modified this file?)
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--ancestry (iterates through the tree's patchlog ancestry)
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* commit: prompts on empty commits, missing log messages
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* update: updates to the requested revision, while retaining local changes.
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prompts to change tree version.
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* revert: undo command that can undo specific types of changes
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* changes: can take two arguments, making delta redundant
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More native implementations of the common commands.
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An init command that will do my-id, make-archive, archive-setup, init-tree
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Option defaults are high on the list, too.
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Aren't you that guy who wrote that aba thing?
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Yeah. aba's nice and all, but POSIX shell isn't my favourite language. It's
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not geared at producing reliable, unambiguous programs. I won't say
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"impossible", since the original Arch implementation was in shell. Python
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(like many other languages) has facilities that make it *easy* to write
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dependable programs. Things like variable scope, string manipulation and
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exceptions are not to be sneezed at.
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But I wrote an aba command!
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Fai supports aba's external commands, which make up 78% of the aba tree
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anyway. So Fai (like aba) is extensible in any language, but Python commands
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have full access to Fai's tools.
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Fai is just a new name for pyaba. I hate programs that are named for their
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programming language. The language is a tool, not your program's
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raison d'etre. (If the language *is* your program's reason for being, don't
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write it!) On the other hand, PyArch makes sense, because it's Python-
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Working around Fai's limitations as a shell:
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When using Fai in shell mode, you'll find it's not as powerful as, say, Bash.
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This is because I don't really want to rewrite Bash. It's hard to find the
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right balance. So you'll occasionally want to force Fai to pass commands
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through the system shell. You can do this by writing the commmands as Fai
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> alias foo bar@baz--2004/meep--mope--0
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But if you want to use the tree-version, you can do:
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> fai alias foo $(tla tree-version)
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Also, Fai commands mask real system utilities, notably diff and mv. To invoke
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diff from Fai, just quote it:
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> "diff" file.old file.new
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You can also use pathnames:
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> /usr/bin/diff file.old file.new
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To import the latest vendor changes from a tarball:
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1. untar the tarball and cd to the directory
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2. $ fai init-tree VENDOR-VERSION
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3. $ fai revert --control-files --revision acur
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4. $ fai add-ids --untagged
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This will update the control files. You may also want to branch at this point.
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the tdate alias behaves strangely if no day is specified.
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removed
fai/README
