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

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Oct 24, 2017, 00:52 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqbmkxbc45.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <7c53071a-5154-1246-d2f1-1064e3f923d4@web.de>

René Scharfe <l.s.r@web.de> writes:

Show 14 quoted lines

> Am 21.10.2017 um 14:18 schrieb Junio C Hamano:
>> 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.

Ah, I misunderstood what you meant, then. I thought you were advocating to move the built-in short-help support to know about and explicitly react to "-?", and somehow forgot that it "works" more or less already.

The fact that "-?" already works for most things is good, but the transition pain still remains, as what's costly is to transition people's expectation (i.e. "'-?' and not '-h' is the way to get short help from any subcommand"), not the implementation to fill the gaps for those that do not yet support '-?', I am afraid.