[Mailman-Developers] [CLI Project] Portioning Commands as Singular or Plural

[Rajeev S]

Hi,

A modification has been suggested for the Command line tools in an IRC
discussion with Abhilash.

It was suggested that, to make commands more intuitive, the commands be
partitioned into singular and plural as per the scale of the action
performed.

For example,

In the current scenario

  >>>./mmclient show user //Lists all users in the system

  >>> ./mmclient show user foo at bar.com //Describes the user foo at bar.com

Usage after the suggested change

  >>>./mmclient show users //Lists all users in the system

  >>>./mmclient show user foo at bar.com //Describes user foo at bar.com

The commands surely do become more intuitive and make more sense, but this
has a negative,the number of commands almost doubles.

Further, Use cases like delete, subscribe and unsubscribe support actions
on multiple users simultaneously.

Currently, the following commands are valid

  >>>./mmclient delete user a at b.com b at c.com d at e.com

  >>>./mmclient delete user a at b.com

If the suggested change is applied, the following commands must work

  >>>./mmclient delete users a at b.com b at c.com d at e.com

  >>>./mmclient delete user a at b.com

both of which perform the same action, using the same procedure.

Another option might be to use *only plurals*, which seems OK for most of
the use cases.