I can see those could have been phrased better: --tollef was
introduced to let people_already_ using Tollef's parallel to continue
working seamlessly, and to allow packagers to create a package that
did this. But the key issue is that you do not put anything in
/etc/parallel/config without stressing to your users that you have
done so: IF the packagers chose to do so, the users should be informed
about this (and the consequences of this) - and preferably they should
have a choice to just get the generic GNU Parallel.
History tells us that is not what happened.
>So as a result we have this situation where --tollef is in
>/etc/parallel/config in many distros (Ubuntu 12.04 in my case) and prevents
>users who are not root from using recent versions of GNU Parallel.
>
>So especially seeing this history, I think GNU Parallel users would be much
>better served by continuing to silently support --tollef for the time being,
>as long as it's overriden by --gnu.
--tollef has been obsolete with a warning for a year and retired
completely for more than a full year. I doubt that people actually
using --tollef on purpose has not converted already, and I would
reckon that it is much fewer affected.
Would it serve the users even better simply to ignore --tollef completely?