I always say `darcs cha`, rather than the longhand `darcs changes`. 
darcs built from HEAD complains that there's no such command cha. 

In HEAD, "changes" is now an alias, and so I suppose that the alias
isn't being
treated in the same way as a normal command. I'm not sure if that's on
purpose
or not, but I would suggest that the alias should be treated in the same way
w.r.t. shorthands (i.e. unique shorthands should identify either commands or
aliases, with a complaint about any non-uniqueness).

It's on purpose that aliases do not get fed into the abbreviations system (the idea being that aliases would cause lots of unwanted clashes/ambiguities; I could have been wrong in my design though)

It sounds like we didn't account for the aliases that arise from command renaming.  I think there ought to be a way to grandfather some aliases into the disambiguation system
 

On 5 December 2013 at 20:41:47, Owen Stephens (bugs@darcs.net) wrote:
>
>
>New submission from Owen Stephens :
>
>I always say `darcs cha`, rather than the longhand `darcs changes`.
>darcs built from HEAD complains that there's no such command cha.
>
>In HEAD, "changes" is now an alias, and so I suppose that the alias
>isn't being
>treated in the same way as a normal command. I'm not sure if that's on
>purpose
>or not, but I would suggest that the alias should be treated in the same way
>w.r.t. shorthands (i.e. unique shorthands should identify either commands or
>aliases, with a complaint about any non-uniqueness).
>
>----------
>messages: 17106
>nosy: owst
>status: unknown
>title: darcs cha shorthand no longer works
>
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-- 
http://erickow.com

To me it is okay that it is on purpose; changing a command name is
painful but if we decide to do it, we need to embrace this change
somehow. The documentation for version 2.10 will reflect it.

BTW this also concerns the automatic completion for shells: these use
darcs --commands (at least the one for zsh does) and hidden commands are
not listed.

Maybe allow user to define their own aliases?

> cat ~/.darcs/alias
amend-unrecord amend-record --unrecord
unpull obliterate

We could even go so far as removing the hard-coded aliases from the sources.

Variation: extend the defaults file syntax with an 'alias' keyword. For
consistency, add keyword 'default', too (but it can be left out for
compatibility):

> cat ~/.darcs/defaults
alias changes log
default record prompt-long-comment

The alias idea deserves its own separate ticket :-)