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

[Andrew Gregory]

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 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

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.

apg