Re: [sr #104327] Flag for unmatched output to stderr?

[Julian Foad]

Tony Abou-Assaleh wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Jun 2005, Julian Foad wrote:
> > Also, be aware that Grep is not in a good position to accept new features this
> > year.
>
> Why be so discouraging?

I was just trying to be realistic.  And I suppose I was trying to discourage 
feature requests of the "Wouldn't this feature be nice?" sort.  I suppose it 
would have been better to say something like, "We've got rather a back-log of 
bug fixing to do before we can get around to considering new features.  If 
you'd like to help with some of the bug fixing first, that would be great."

> I think what you meant is that we are accepting
> new features, but we won't be implementing them this year. Is that
> correct?

Umm... it's not clear what you mean by "accept" in that context.  My position 
is that we should record carefully thought out proposals for features which 
really would improve Grep while not straying from its core purpose, but that we 
should not implement any new features until most of the known bugs are fixed 
and released.  Therefore we should not encourage people to send patches for new 
features, because they will go out of date and not get the attention that they 
deserve.

The phrase "this year" was intended to give the approximate time-scale of the 
current situation, not to discourage anyone from trying to reach that stage 
earlier.

- Julian