On 01/07/12 17:47, Bruno Haible wrote: > But -P currently is equivalent to --unidirectional-new-file.
Yeouch. I forgot about that. You're right, we'd need to take the next step in deprecating -P. (The first step was taken in 2002, when it was removed from the documentation, precisely for this reason -- can you tell that this has been on the TODO list for some time?...) We also would need to deprecate -H and -L. -H has no effect anyway, and probably --speed-large-files should be removed from the documentation too (though still a no-op for backward compatibility). Given the large set of changes, and the likely use of -P and -L in scripts, I expect that the first deprecation step should just warn on stderr and continue, rather than having a fatal error. As far as the long option names go, the GNU utilities aren't consistent here, but perhaps we should use this for diffutils: -P == --no-dereference (as in cp, du) -H == --dereference-command-line (as in ls) -L == --dereference (as in cp, du, ls, stat) omitting the short options for now, as the old meanings are being deprecated. > 'patch' does not break through this additional lines. It simply ignores them. True, hence the proposed patch can be an intermediate one on the way to building a better one. But I suppose that we should document that the output format is likely to change, so that people are less likely to depend on it.
