Re: [Alt. PATCH] ls-remote: deprecate -h as short for --heads

From: René Scharfe <l.s.r@web.de>
Date: Oct 23, 2017, 15:05 UTC
Message-ID: <7c53071a-5154-1246-d2f1-1064e3f923d4@web.de>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqh8usg0cs.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>

Am 21.10.2017 um 14:18 schrieb Junio C Hamano:

Show 10 quoted lines

> René Scharfe <l.s.r@web.de> writes:
> 
>> FWIW, I use "-?" for that everywhere.  I have yet to find a command or
>> environment where it does something dangerous.
> 
> Yeah, it would have made the world a better place if we made that
> choice back in 2008.  If we start a transition to make it so right
> now, we might be able to make the world a better place by 2022,
> perhaps.  I am not sure if the pain during the transition is worth
> it, though.

"-?" works fine with builtins already -- they complain that the option is unknown and then show the short help text.

If we removed the special handling for "-h" from parse-options it would do the same for most commands, i.e. we'd get an additional error message, followed by the short help text that we're used to see. We could check for "git grep -h" without any other arguments and show the usage text in that case. We could do the same for "git ls-remote -h" as well, but I'm not sure we want to.

So the cost would be an extra error message in most cases, and possibly the inability to show help with "git ls-remote -h". That doesn't sound very painful.

René