[Suggestio] Remove hyphens in commands

[89luca89]

[Suggestio] Remove hyphens in commands

[89luca89]

That would break backwards compatibility as right now the distrobox-init script itself is mounted inside the container as entry point, and renaming it would break existing distroboxes

For now I see having both option active as the only way, having a distrobox command that manages subcommands and calls the dedicated scripts so that we have both ways
Then in the future we can think of a migration path

But I would like to maintain the code base as lean as possible, as the main target of the project was also this. Having smaller more readable files, easier to debug and modify
Instead of monolithic scripts of 2-3k LOCs which then will obviously become unmanageable

[89luca89]

@TheEvilSkeleton I would like in the future to do something like this

But I want to maintain backward compatibility and I would like to avoid creating a single shell file with all inside because it would become quite unmanageable and unreadable

Any ideas?

Edit: one thing I like is also that the action of mounting the entry point/init in the container implies only having the init available inside of it, not the whole distrobox which is something I like a bit more

We could come up with a generic distrobox file that only manages the various subcommands and calls the dedicated files maybe?

[TheEvilSkeleton]

The only idea I have at the moment is making bash act like a compiled language, where all "libraries" (functions and such) get copied and prepended to the main bash script during install.

[manics]

You could make distrobox a wrapper script?

#!/bin/sh
set -eu
COMMAND="$1"
shift
exec distrobox-$COMMAND "$@"

With the added benefit that it handles new commands automatically.

[alegrey91]

But I want to maintain backward compatibility and I would like to avoid creating a single shell file with all inside because it would become quite unmanageable and unreadable

I think you should create a sort of library and then use just a single file to avoid code duplication. It's better to have a single tool (in my opinion).

[89luca89]

You could make distrobox a wrapper script?

#!/bin/sh
set -eu
COMMAND="$1"
shift
exec distrobox-$COMMAND "$@"

With the added benefit that it handles new commands automatically.

Yep that was the idea

But I want to maintain backward compatibility and I would like to avoid creating a single shell file with all inside because it would become quite unmanageable and unreadable

I think you should create a sort of library and then use just a single file to avoid code duplication. It's better to have a single tool (in my opinion).

The library approach could work in the future, but would break compatibility with existing distroboxes as the entry point is a mount of the distrobix-init file itself.

A sensible middle approach would be having single/separated files to do the stuff like now
And a distrobox script that will manage the subcommands (like @manics said)

This would enable also to use simple subcommands for quality of life (list, remove, clone, etc etc)

[89luca89]

Started a first implementation of the wrapper and added a couple of quality of life commands like list and rm

[89luca89]

I'm merging and closing this, if anyone has suggestions on including other quality of life commands just open a new issue 👍