From: Tomi Ollila <tomi.ollila@iki.fi>
To: Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net>,
David Bremner <david@tethera.net>,
Ciprian Dorin Craciun <ciprian.craciun@gmail.com>,
notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Subject: Re: Inconsistencies in handling command flags: `--flag=value` different than `--flag value`
Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2020 21:20:56 +0300 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <m2mu6w23jr.fsf@guru.guru-group.fi> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87k120x0wh.fsf@fifthhorseman.net>
On Mon, Apr 27 2020, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> On Mon 2020-04-27 14:53:07 -0300, David Bremner wrote:
>> Quoting notmuch(1)
>>
>> OPTION SYNTAX
>> All options accepting an argument can be used with '='
>> or ':' as a separator. For the cases where it's not ambiguous
>> (in particular excluding boolean options), a space can also be
>> used.
>
> This is a pretty twisty way to say what we mean. Are there other cases
> besides boolean options? If there are, perhaps it'd be clearer to say
> something like this for the last sentence:
>
> Except for boolean options and other potential ambiguous cases, a
> space can also be used as a separator.
>
> If there aren't, we could say:
>
> Except for boolean options (which would be ambiguous), a space can
> also be used as a separator.
>
> Alternately, we could deprecate using whitespace for all options,
> produce explicit warnings to stderr when whitespace appears on the next
was it so, that originally we did not support whitespace, but David
added that in some commit...
> release, remove the suggestion to use a whitespace separator from the
> documentation, and eventually phase it out entirely in some future
> release.
Alternatively we could check that next arg is (case-insensitively)
(subset of) 'true', 'false', 'yes', 'no', '0', '1', 't', 'nil'
(but not tpyoes of these ;) and in that case have that as an option
value...
... would that work better for human user who just wants to be
fluent on command line -- frontends can then always use = and option
values...
> --dkg
Tomi
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-04-27 18:21 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 19+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-04-24 12:53 Inconsistencies in handling command flags: `--flag=value` different than `--flag value` Ciprian Dorin Craciun
2020-04-27 17:53 ` David Bremner
2020-04-27 18:02 ` Daniel Kahn Gillmor
2020-04-27 18:20 ` Tomi Ollila [this message]
2020-04-27 19:21 ` Ciprian Dorin Craciun
2020-04-29 2:16 ` Daniel Kahn Gillmor
2020-04-29 14:18 ` Tomi Ollila
2020-04-29 15:39 ` David Bremner
2020-04-29 15:45 ` Jameson Graef Rollins
2020-04-29 16:28 ` David Bremner
2020-05-05 18:28 ` Carl Worth
2020-05-07 19:26 ` [PATCH] notmuch(1): clarify documentation about --option/value separators Daniel Kahn Gillmor
2020-05-07 23:40 ` Carl Worth
2020-05-08 12:01 ` David Bremner
2020-05-08 16:06 ` Daniel Kahn Gillmor
2020-04-29 15:59 ` Inconsistencies in handling command flags: `--flag=value` different than `--flag value` Ciprian Dorin Craciun
2020-04-29 16:07 ` Jameson Graef Rollins
2020-04-29 15:33 ` Jameson Graef Rollins
2020-04-30 16:59 ` Daniel Kahn Gillmor
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