Hello. Our command-line option handling is *interesting*. Did you know that:
- our options work in -foo form and --foo form; - they are case-insensitive; - this holds for both short options (e.g. -h) and long options (e.g. -help). So, for example, the following are all equivalent: -h, -H, --h, --H. As are -help, --help, -HELP, --HeLp. At least, all this is true for the options that are processed via the main option-processing code. Some of our options are handled elsewhere, via ad hoc code that is generally less flexible. Despite this flexibility, in all our help messages we only mention the -foo form for long options. But -foo options are kind of archaic and --foo options are much more standard these days. So it would be nice to switch to them. In particular, it would avoid messes like |mach run| having a mixture of -foo and --foo options. In bug 1080302 there are r+'d patches for converting all our help messages and almost all of our comments from -foo form to --foo form. (And also for making some of the ad hoc option handling more consistent with the main option handling, and also for making |mach run| use --foo options throughout.) Before I land those patches, I thought I would ask here if anyone can see any reason not to do this. Remember, it's not a functional change -- both -foo and --foo options will still work -- it's just a documentation change. An obvious follow-up is to convert our code to use --foo options instead of -foo options, which is bug 1088430, and slightly riskier. Another obvious follow-up is to drop support for -foo options, but that's *much* harder, so I haven't even bothered filing a bug about that. Thanks. Nick _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
