Re: [PATCH] git-am: error out when seeing -b/--binary

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 12, 2012, 22:22 UTC
Message-ID: <20120312222227.GC11362@burratino>
In-Reply-To: <874ntto4t8.fsf@thomas.inf.ethz.ch>

Thomas Rast wrote:

> Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

Show 15 quoted lines

>> Hm, on second thought, if people are seeing this message, I would
>> prefer if they write to the mailing list so we can find out about it.
>> So I really would rather see this say
>>
>> 	--binary)
>> 		: ;;
>>
>> and have "-b" completely unrecognized, without any words in our
>> defense except for a note in the release notes mentioning the option's
>> removal and that it has been an unadvertised backward-compatibility
>> no-op since 1.6.0.
>
> I'd hate doing that, mostly because other projects got me really angry
> about similar issues, e.g., 71c020c (Disable asciidoc 8.4.1+ semantics
> for `{plus}` and friends, 2009-07-25).

Oh, now that I think about it that way, you're definitely right.

So, how about something like this?

	--binary)
		: ;;
	-b)
		gettextln >&2 "The -b option (a no-op short for --binary) was removed in 1.7.10."
		die "$(gettext "Please adjust your scripts.")"
		;;

Mentioning deprecation in 1.6.0 in the message left me uneasy because we never actually did anything to actively deprecate the option; it just has not been needed since 1.4.3 and we stopped advertising it in the manpage in 1.6.0. So I don't like the implication of "this is all right because we told you so" --- on the contrary, it is "in practice nobody seems to be using this option and we hope nobody will notice when we take it away".

Jonathan