On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 6:06 AM, Benno Schulenberg <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 2015-01-01 14:33, Sami Kerola wrote: >> * src/hello.c: Remove -h and -v options, and leave --help and --version >> as they were. > > Ouch, ouch, ouch! > > Maybe the GNU standards say nothing about short options, but it > is *so* much a custom for command-line tools to recognize -h and > -V for --help and --version, that I don't think it is a good idea > to show as an example-to-be-imitated these two long options without > any corresponding short options. You may wish to poke some GNU > people about this directly. Karl Berry? Eric Blake? Maybe > mister Stallman himself? > > Also, if you remove -h and -v, why not also remove -g and -t? > > Long options are nice for scripts, for clarity, so commands don't > need comments. Short options are great (nearly essential) for > typing things on the command line.
IMHO, it's not that bad. Sometimes, you can get the same effect with --h and --v. That works when those abbreviated options are unambiguous, so would fail if there is a --verbose option or any other long-named option whose name starts with "v". It's probably worthwhile to leave some options as long-name-only and others with both short and long names, so people can see how to implement the two approaches. Besides, in many cases, we omit the short-named options to avoid potential for conflict with other-vendor versions of the same tool.
