[pacman-dev] [PATCH] Add short options for mark as deps or explicit

[Allan McRae]

On 07/03/13 06:31, Dan McGee wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 2:19 PM, William Giokas <1007380 at 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 at 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