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

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Mar 12, 2012, 22:12 UTC
Message-ID: <7vy5r5o4ea.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20120312215607.GB11362@burratino>

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

Show 11 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 do not mind keeping --binary working intact, but I think an approach to say that "-b" no longer works and is finally removed very firmly is a very sane one. We would be getting a slightly better feel of how stale the people's script could be with your approach, but at the same time, we would be annoying far more people who do not even know that there are some people passionately trying to make the users' Git life better, or where these people are hanging out.

I do not think removal of a no-op "-b" is something subject to voting at this point, so the only thing you would get from the better feel of the user universe is when we can repurpose the option safely.