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Re: Passing unused opts to every command considered harmful

From: Brian W. Fitzpatrick <fitz_at_red-bean.com>
Date: 2007-12-18 16:25:09 CET

On Dec 18, 2007 10:16 AM, Ben Collins-Sussman <sussman@red-bean.com> wrote:
> I think what's really bothering fitz (and me) is that we've made a
> tradeoff here. We used to have a really 'tight' commandline UI. We
> decided from day one that all options would be global, and that their
> position in the commandline wouldn't matter. It also meant that each
> subcommand had a very succinct list of options that it understood, and
> rejected all others. Both of these design decisions were aimed at
> making the CLI more usable: no more CVS-like confusions ("does the -d
> come before or after the URI?"), and no more confusion about whether
> an option was appropriate for a subcommand or not. 'svn help
> subcommand' was clear and consise.
>
> Now it feels like we'd traded some of this tightness for the sake of
> making it easier for developers to write testing scripts, putting
> developers before users. The new design feels like a premature
> optimization ("someday all commands might make use of these
> switches..."), and users can't run 'svn help subcommand' to get a
> sense of say, whether a command actually has the potential to talk to
> a repository or not.

What he said.

-Fitz

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Received on Tue Dec 18 16:28:33 2007

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