On Sat, Oct 14, 2017 at 11:37:28AM +0900, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> writes: > > > So there are two separate questions/tasks: > > > > 1. Should we remove the special handling of "-q" leftover from this > > deprecation? I think the answer is yes. > > > > 2. Should we teach the diff machinery as a whole to treat "-q" as a > > synonym for "--quiet". > > Good questions. And thanks for archaeology. > > The topic #1 above is something that should have happened when "-q" stopped working > as "--diff-filter=d", and we probably should have started to error > out then, so that scripts that relied on the original behaviour > would have been forced to update. That did not happen which was a > grave mistake. > > By doing so, we would have made sure any script that uses "-q" died > out, and after a while, we can talk about reusing it for other > purposes, like the topic #2 above. > > Is it worth making "-q" error out while doing #1 and keep it error > out for a few years? I have a feeling that the answer might be > unfortunately yes _if_ we want to also do #2. Even though we broke > "-q" for the scripts who wanted to see it ignore only the removals 4 > years ago and left it broken since then. Removals are much rarer > than modifications and additions, so it wouldn't be surprising if > the users of these scripts simply did not notice the old breakage, > but if we made "-q" to mean "--quiet" without doing #1, they will > break, as all diffs these scripts work on will suddenly give an > empty output. Yeah, after thinking about it, I do think we'd want to restart the deprecation period. For some features it would be fine, but this one is sufficiently subtle that I agree there's a good chance scripts might have been broken without anybody noticing them. > If we aren't doing #2, then I do not think we need to make "-q" > error out when we do #1, though. I don't think we'd add an explicit error-out. But by removing the leftover code, we would naturally say "no such option: -q", which amounts to the same thing. > In any case, if we were to do both of the above two, they must > happen in that order, not the other way around. Yep, agreed. -Peff
