Re: [bug #61774] Docs for find -delete out of sync

[James Youngman]

On Wed, Feb 2, 2022 at 10:43 PM Bernhard Voelker
<mail@bernhard-voelker.de> wrote:
> Often the GNU command line projects like coreutils, findutils, grep, etc.
> are receiving begging requests to add yet another option for a certain
> use case (even although there exists another way to do it).
> Most often we can reject those requests; new options or functions add
> complexity to the code which decreases maintainability.
> But once an option or a feature is added, it is very hard to remove it
> again - for decades.

The immense amount of time that we took over the backward-incompatible
changes to "-mode +xxx" are an example of this.    Though perhaps we
over-did that, as I do not remember receiving a single complaint.

Contrast that with the case where we did introduce a warning that the
command-line may have surprising semantics:

$ find . -maxdepth 1 -name 'umsp' -xdev -ls
find: warning: you have specified the global option -xdev after the
argument -name, but global options are not positional, i.e., -xdev
affects tests specified before it as well as those specified after it.
Please specify global options before other arguments.

After the first public release adding this warning, we received many,
many complaints.

James.