Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: Obsoleting abrowse

[David Allouche]

On Sat, 2005-07-30 at 11:06 +0200, Matthieu Moy wrote:
> I'd also like to actually remove abrowse because it would avoid
> beginners asking "shall I use abrowse or rbrowse? What's the
> difference? Why are there two commands?".
> 
> Last thing: It would decrement $(baz help | grep ':' | wc -l) by one!

Me too!

> > Or maybe add --regexp to "abrowse", I don't know...
> 
> Here's my proposal:
> 
> 1) Add --id-regexp (we already have --patch-regexp to filter on the
>    summary field) to rbrowse, make the exact search the default.

As mentioned in another message, why not just "--regexp" and "-R"?

> 2) Rename "rbrowse" to simply "browse"
> 
> 3) Make "abrowse" and "rbrowse" deprecated aliases for "browse".
>    Remove the abrowse code completely.

I do not think that making existing commands deprecated aliases for new
commands that have a subtly different behaviour is a good idea.

Deprecated aliases are good for commands that are _just_ renamed, with
no change in previously legal uses.

Commands that are truly deprecated in favour of a similar command should
be replaced by dummy command that fails with a very short error message
of the form:

        abrowse has been replaced by browse.
        Use "baz browse -H" for details of usage.

The rationale is to avoid surprising behaviour when trying to use the
new command in the same way as the old name, be helpful while muscle
memory is being retrained, and not flood the user with a long help
message every time muscle memory invokes the old command.

-- 
                                                            -- ddaa

signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part