Edmund Wong wrote:
> Olivier FAURAX wrote:
> > http://subversion.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3436
> > Issue #|3436
> > Summary|Short option for --ignore-externals (-i ?)
> > Is it possible to add a short option for --ignore-externals, for
> example -i or -I ?
>
> Does anyone have any objections about this issue? If not, how about
> objections about me taking this? If not, is there policy as to which
> character to use? (My tendency is towards '-i'.)
I would very much encourage you to take an issue such as this one, if
it's a development that we want. And I see that this one looks like a
good one to choose for an easy task.
However, as I expect you are aware, an issue being in the issue tracker
just means that someone, anyone, put it there; it doesn't mean there is
any kind of consensus on it.
We have always been very cautious of using up single-letter options,
because there are not enough of them available for all the meanings we
want. There are several options that we might want to abbreviate to '-i'
or '-I':
--no-ignores
--non-interactive
--ignore-externals
--ignore-ancestry
and we might well add more in 1.7, 1.8, 1.9.
It could well be that --ignore-externals is the most commonly used by
far, in which case we might want to add a short alias for it. But before
we jump to any conclusions, we should also ask (the original poster, and
ourselves) whether the problem would be better solved in a different
way, perhaps by making "ignore-externals" a configurable option in
~/subversion/config and having an inverse option (--with-externals ?)
available to override it if it only rarely needs to be overridden.
Looking at the list of options we have, it seems to me that it would
make sense for many of them to have a customisable default in the config
file, and both positive and negative forms available on the command
line.
We also have a precedent of abbreviating a long option to a shorter
"long" option: --changelist is also --cl. Maybe there's a good "long"
abbreviation for --ignore-externals.
Questions like this are one reason why an issue should have been
discussed on the mailing list before it was filed.
Do you have any involvement or perspective on this particular issue
yourself?
- Julian
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Received on 2009-07-13 17:14:12 CEST