[pacman-dev] change to option handling for --debug and -v

[Ray Kohler]

On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 1:21 PM, Dave Reisner <d at falconindy.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 12:10:58PM -0400, Ray Kohler wrote:
>> I noticed a change in the way 3.5 processes some of its command-line
>> flags: It used to be that --debug and -v were handled immediately,
>> such that their initial output appeared before pacman complained of a
>> usage error. Now, it errors out immediately.
>>
>> This may seem like an unimportant case, but it actually breaks pkgfile
>> from pkgtools, which runs both "pacman -v" and "pacman --debug"
>> without any further arguments (so it can parse the output). As I
>> haven't seen any bug report, any update to pkgfile from Daenyth, or
>> any other comment, I thought I'd ask if this was intentional, and
>> whether it is pacman, or pkgfile, that ought to change.
>
> I worked with Daenyth to resolve this back in January:
>
> https://github.com/Daenyth/pkgtools/commit/4f7ce135cd942c77679e9212fb0ca98f4e354d9e

Ah, I didn't look far enough back in that repo to see it. Good idea
using -T, I had forgotten about it. (And it's worth mentioning that it
doesn't appear in pacman's usage message.)

>>
>> I found it actually easy to work around, by modifying pkgfile to use a
>> -Q main operation in both of these cases.
>>
>> If I haven't made myself clear, try doing just "pacman -v" or "pacman
>> --debug" on both 3.4.x and 3.5.0.
>>
>
> Personally, I'm not sure how important this is given that pkgfile got
> bitten by parsing something it shouldn't be parsing. I'd actually vote
> to move output generated by -v into --debug, since the verbose flag is
> _only_ used for this one output.

I rather agree that this is a case of something being used as an
interface, that was never intended as such. So it's certainly not an
obvious regression, or anything worth any blame to the pacman devs.