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

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
To: "René Scharfe" <l.s.r@web.de>
Cc: "Jeff King" <peff@peff.net>,
	"Git Mailing List" <git@vger.kernel.org>,
	"Martin Ågren" <martin.agren@gmail.com>,
	"Thomas Rikl" <trikl@online.de>,
	"Thomas Gummerer" <t.gummerer@gmail.com>,
	"Jonathan Nieder" <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Alt. PATCH] ls-remote: deprecate -h as short for --heads
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2017 09:52:58 +0900	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <xmqqbmkxbc45.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <7c53071a-5154-1246-d2f1-1064e3f923d4@web.de> (=?utf-8?Q?=22R?= =?utf-8?Q?en=C3=A9?= Scharfe"'s message of "Mon, 23 Oct 2017 17:05:23 +0200")

René Scharfe <l.s.r@web.de> writes:

> 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.