From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2013 04:02:14 GMT
Subject: Re: Fwd: Possible bug report: `git commit -ammend`
Message-ID: <20131116040214.GA24804@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <CACsJy8Ckb+qdQFcTHPcAiRy_08Nxtz5Uh_9R+NXz4yixWR9DUQ@mail.gmail.com>

On Sat, Nov 16, 2013 at 10:28:36AM +0700, Duy Nguyen wrote:

> > Yes. This is a rather widespread convention (e.g. rm -fr == rm -r -f).
> > Git does a special-case for -amend to avoid confusion:
> >
> >   $ git commit -amend
> >   error: did you mean `--amend` (with two dashes ?)
> >
> > But it did not special-case the double-typo.
> 
> "-m" taking a string without a space or '=' increases the risk of this
> typo. If it does require '=' or ' ' after -m then -ammend is more
> likely to be rejected. Anybody know why we should support -mabc,
> besides convenient?

For flags with optional arguments, "-m abc" would not work (we do not
know if "abc" is the argument or the next flag). An example of such a
flag is "git status -uall".

We could disallow it for mandatory options, but that would create an
inconsistency in the option parsing.

Other than that, I think it is mostly convenience and compatibility with
other option-parsing systems.

-Peff