Guillaume Galeazzi <guillaume.galeazzi@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > The difference is that you repeat twice the same flag. Sometime > repeating a flag overwrite the previous value,... I already said I was *not* suggesting a concrete syntax. The more important point was to make us realize that we need to think outside of "active-only" and make sure we can support other kinds of selection criteria for submodules. So whatever syntax you would want to use to specify more than one, combine, and negate, I do not care too deeply, as long as it is in line with what we use in the other parts of the system ;-). > Regarding previous example, it use '!' to negate the value. Not all > people know the meaning of it. We mark the bottom commit by negating with ^ (e.g. "git log ^maint master"), we mark "not ignored" entries by prefixing with '!' in .gitignore, we mark "unset" entries by prefixing with '-' in .gitattributes (the '!' prefix is used to mark "unspecified" entries), and "rev-list --boundary" output uses '~' prefix to mean "this is not part of the range". So there are many one-letter "not" we already use, and there seem to be no rule to pick which one in what context X-<. So spelling out "--no-blah" to mean "not with blah" is probably a good thing to do (especially if readers do not mind being English centric).