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

From: Thomas Rast <trast@inf.ethz.ch>
Date: Mar 12, 2012, 22:03 UTC
Message-ID: <874ntto4t8.fsf@thomas.inf.ethz.ch>
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'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).

By the time I knew what the problem was, I figured posting anywhere was useless since the change was already in the wild, and thus needed working around on our end; and all I could possibly post was an angry letter saying how unhappy I was about their work.

I didn't, and worked around it. But that was after a lot of frustrated investigation. So I'd rather not do the same to our unlucky users.

-- 
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch