Folks,

Personally, if we're going to argue about the merits of the consistent
--no- vs the human-friendly --dont- prefixes, we should consider that in
all likelihood, we are not going to be renaming any flags unless
somebody finds the killer argument to do it.  If it's a great idea, then
by all means, let's do it.  If it's merely a good idea, then let's just
let inertia win on this one (and be careful on how we design future
flags)

P.S. I now remember why I was confused about basic and advanced options.
I was thinking of hidden commands.  We have hidden commands, but we
don't have hidden flags, maybe hidden flags would be useful as a way of
keeping legacy flags around.

On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 11:35:00 +0200, Dan Pascu wrote:
> The purpose of the user interface is to _facilitate_ interaction between a 
> human and a computer, not to make the programmer's life simpler.
> Of course it's very difficult to see that when one has a lazy programmers' 
> point of view, where the user interface is just another necessary evil 
> appendix that one has to live with and (God forbid!) maintain it.

I agree with this sentiment about the sense of perspective, but I think
it's a good idea to moderate the point about lazy programmers.

The purpose of being a lazy programmer is for us to serve our users
better, and sometimes that means sacrificing things which are good for
the user so that we can accomplish /other/ things which we hope are
better for that same user.  So arguments in favour of laziness should be
considered in that light, i.e. as a deliberate resource-allocation
decision, and should not be looked down upon.

-- 
Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9

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