Re: cut enhancement: -C as short option for --complement

[Eric Blake]

On 04/05/2012 03:10 PM, Mark Krenz wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 05, 2012 at 08:54:31PM GMT, Jim Meyering [address@hidden] said 
> the following:
>>> Eventually another option may come along and all the people who are used
>>
>> If we were adding options frequently and/or blindly,
>> you might have a point, but we're well aware of the issues
>> and add new options infrequently.  When we do, we take care
>> not to impinge on existing abbreviations.
> 
>   Thank you for the good job you have been doing in filtering out the
> bad requests. I feel that most GNU commands are consise and not
> littered with useless options.
> 
>   If you don't like the suggestion of using -C for the short option,
> then would you suggest another letter that would be better?

The _easiest_ way to justify a short option letter is by reference to
another implementation that has the same semantics, and use that letter.
 Another road to this would be proposing the feature for inclusion into
POSIX, and picking a letter as part of your proposal (since POSIX will
only standardize on short names, not --complement); if the feature is
deemed useful enough to standardize, you've managed to pick a short letter.

In other words, it's not the choice of -C that we're worried about, it's
the fact that you're even proposing a short option in the first place
without providing compelling evidence that it is widely used or picked
up by other implementations.

-- 
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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