Re: [Man-db-devel] [PATCH 2/2] man(1): add NAME..[.[.]] names

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Oct 03, 2016 at 08:50:11PM +0000, Mihail Konev wrote:
> `man chmod..` is now the same as `man -f chmod`
> `man chmod...` is now the same as `man -k chmod`
> `man chmod....` is now the same as `man -K chmod`

I'm afraid I really don't like this at all, sorry.  It's much too weird
and idiosyncratic, and it means that the way the whole command line is
parsed depends on the content of a single non-option positional
argument.  Fixing that part of it would require quite a bit more code to
switch behaviour for each positional argument, and in some cases it's
not obvious how that could be done in a way that wouldn't be excessively
confusing.

In any case, I don't think this pulls its weight.  At best it saves a
single character, and at worst it's actually more characters.  That
isn't worth complicating man(1)'s already-labyrinthine argument handling
further.

So thanks for the patch, but I won't take this.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden