On Thu, Mar 07, 2013 at 09:29:55AM -0600, Dan McGee wrote:
On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 9:08 AM, Sébastien Luttringer <seblu@seblu.net> wrote:
On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 6:32 AM, Allan McRae <allan@archlinux.org> wrote:
On 07/03/13 15:30, Andrew Gregory wrote:
On 03/07/13 at 02:51pm, Allan McRae wrote:
On 07/03/13 06:31, Dan McGee wrote:
On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 2:19 PM, William Giokas <1007380@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Mar 05, 2013 at 02:03:14AM +0100, Sébastien Luttringer wrote: >> The main (only) purpose of -D is to be able to change packages installation >> status (deps or explicit). Having a short form offer a similar experience that >> other main pacman option (e.g. Su). >> >> Signed-off-by: Sébastien Luttringer <seblu@seblu.net> > > The --asdeps option for -S and -U does not have a shortopt. In my > worthess opinion, this is a bad idea, as -d for those operations is > --nodeps.
This was my thought as well. If we are willing to use a shortopt, it should apply to ALL top-level operations in the same fashion (or be rejected completely), and not mislead. -Q/--query match this criteria, but currently -d for -U/-S would be totally unexpected. So -1 from me.
I have consciously made decisions over the past 3 years to not add new shortopts unless they are universally applicable, so this would be a step against that. If we were to do this, we would want to remove the -d shortopt for --nodeps in the next release, and then add these in the following release. However, this is cumbersome as `--nodeps --nodeps` is really silly to type out as we allow this option to be passed twice for even more dep-ignoring behavior.
I made the decision to take this based on:
1) it would be good to have a short options 2) the short letters made sense 3) the current usage of -d/-e in -Q is fairly similar 4) the current usage of -d in -S is an operation that is unrelated to -D so will not cause confusion.
People manage to understand that -Sd is different from -Qd. Why the need to enforce consistency when there is already none?
Allan
I think that the problem is not just that -d means different things for different operations, but that --asdeps and --asexplicit shorten differently based on the operation. A user would likely see that --asdeps shortens to -d with -D and assume it to do the same for -S because --asdeps is a valid option there too. A short option may mean different things for different operations, but all operations that accept a particular long option should use the same short option for it.
OK. I separate out the --asdep for -S/-U and -D mentally because they are doing completely different things. But I see the point.
ok, we can use -e to explicit deps, as it's not used on -S/-U/-D (which have all --asexplicit).
-d is used by --nodeps, do you have a suggestion for a short option for --asdeps?
Not every operation deserves a shortopt; these are used so much less than other operations that I don't feel the loss of self-explanation is worth it.
-Dan
+1. We've made a point of explcitly *removing* the shortopts for infrequently used or dangerous options (-k no longer exists for --dbonly, and -f for --force has gone away). I tend to think that anything involving the -D operation can be destructive and infrequently used. Let's not go in the opposite direction of this.