--strict vs --no-newline

Summary: I noticed in irregularity, and I plan to tweak the command-line UI a bit to make the '--no-newline' and '--strict' options more consistent.

For a long time we had:

  * svnversion --no-newline
    Suppresses the newline after the revision number.
    Help: "do not output the trailing newline".

  * svn propget --strict
    Suppresses the newline after the prop val.
    Help: "don't print an extra newline".

Originally, 'svn propget --strict' also suppressed the printing of the file name, hence its name being rather general, but in recent years the option is not allowed where more than one result is possible (multiple targets, or depth > empty) nor with --verbose.

With the new-in-1.8(?) '--show-inherited-props' option, 'svn propget --strict' will suppress the newline and the printing of the filename when printing the (multiple) inherited properties for a single target path. That means the property values are all squashed together, and this seems to be a non-useful behaviour, an oversight. I think it should reject the '--strict' option when showing inherited properties, like for the other cases that can produce multiple outputs.

More recently, we gained an 'svn youngest' command, which takes a '--no-newline' option. In r1601362 today, I added the '--no-newline' to 'svnlook youngest', for consistency with the new 'svn youngest'.

Now I intend to:

  * make 'svn propget --strict --show-inherited-props' error out;

  * make 'svn propget --no-newline' an alias for 'svn propget --strict'.

How to do the latter, exactly? Either make '--strict' an option-name alias for '--no-newline', in which case 'svn youngest --strict' will become an available option; or keep the two options separate and have 'propget' accept both (with the same behaviour) and 'youngest' only accept '--no-newline'. Which is the cleaner UI, the one with fewer invocation options for the user or the one with fewer irregularities?

Thoughts?

- Julian

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