On Mon, Aug 03, 2020 at 06:47:20PM +0300, Sergey Organov wrote: > > A command line option that takes _optional_ argument is evil; it > > hurts teachability (e.g. "why does this option always require > > "--opt=val" and refuses '--opt val'?"). > > Yeah, I sympathize. Sorry, the optional argument was my suggestion. I don't think they're that evil, but I agree they require extra knowledge for the user. I don't mind avoiding them when possible (and it's definitely possible here). > > Introduce --diff-parent=(none|<parent-number>|c|cc|all) that is > > different from --diff-merges, and -m and --[no-]diff-merges can be > > defined in terms of that, at which point we can gradually deprecate > > them if we wanted to, no? > > Sounds great, I only hoped we can do it right now, with this new > --diff-merges option, maybe as a pre-requisite to the patches in > question, but Jeff said it's too late, dunno why. It's too late for "-m" to change semantics (we could do a long deprecation, but I don't see much point in doing so). But --diff-merges is definitely still changeable until we release v2.29. My resistance was mostly that I didn't want to complicate my series by adding new elements. But we could do something on top. -Peff
