On Fri, 2009-08-21 at 08:59 +1000, Adam Murdoch wrote: > [ . . . ] > > > > I'm going to switch to a trailing - character for now, to get the broken > > > windows build to pass. > > > > I am not sure that will work as well as you hope. Commands are read > > left-to-right and people generally stop reading the word when they have > > recognized it and they move on to the next word. This means ends of > > words are often not read in the same detail as the beginning of a word. > > Trailing - could get lost. > > Maybe. People write the command-lines much, much more often than they > read them, so I'm not sure it's much of a problem. > Yes and no. I agree writing a command line is more common, but you still have to read the line and trailing - is such a small character in most fonts, it can be mistaken for a mark on the screen. Having said that, my main worry is Bash scripts where the command is read more than written and is being edited using the editor font not the terminal font.
> > I was going to suggest a character such as @
> > or # -- something big, preferably used at the start as you were trying
> > with ! and ^.
> >
> > The problem with # is that it is used as the comment character in
> > scripts so might present a problem. I haven't experimented.
>
> It seems to me that any useful punctuation character, other than '-',
> is pretty much taken already.
There is always * I don't thing any command line interpreter uses that.
>
> An alternative might be to use a command-line option for excluding
> tasks:
>
> gradle developerBuild -x test -x check
> gradle developerBuild -x test,check
I think this might be preferable since the whole point is to change the
behaviour of the developerBuild task, not to have test and check as
tasks. The question arises whether the following should be allowed as
well/instead of:
gradle -x test -x check developerBuild
gradle -x test,check developerBuild
Using an option like this would seem to better fit the standard model of
CLI.
>
> Having used the nnn- format for a few days, I'm pretty happy with it.
> It works ok. And the behaviour is so very much better than the old
> -Dskip.nnn behaviour.
I can see the frustration of -Dskip.nnn that is clumsy. I think
replacing it with -x nnn rather than nnn- is better.
>
--
Russel.
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