[svn.haxx.se] · SVN Dev · SVN Users · SVN Org · TSVN Dev · TSVN Users · Subclipse Dev · Subclipse Users · this month's index

Re: Here's the way I suggest the options really work

From: Karl Fogel <kfogel_at_galois.collab.net>
Date: 2000-10-16 04:07:01 CEST

Some principles I've been thinking about, but haven't stated on the
list until now:

Not every option must appear in both long and short forms. An option
that is commonly used must have a short form, of course (personally, I
don't think it also needs to also have a long form in that case). An
option that is more rarely used should have only a long form.

We're starting with a tremendous advantage here -- we have a decade or
so of CVS evolution to learn from. So we can probably make very good
guesses about which options will be commonly used, especially since
this mailing list represents such a broad range of CVS usage.

Greg Stein <gstein@lyra.org> writes:
> Long forms are good when you have a bazillion options and you need to make
> sure you aren't using the wrong one. e.g. "is -v for verbose or version?
> damn. I'll just use --verbose" If Subversion has a bazillion options, then
> I think that we've done something wrong :-)

There's nothing wrong with having a bazillion options, as long as you
don't present them all to the user as being equally important. CVS
has a bazillion options, and I've used almost all of them at one time
or another (some more often than others, of course!). But the
documentation fortunately never claimed to me that "cvs admin -o" is
as important as "update -r"...
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:11 2006

This is an archived mail posted to the Subversion Dev mailing list.

This site is subject to the Apache Privacy Policy and the Apache Public Forum Archive Policy.