Re: Octave 4.4 Proposal: make --no-gui the default

[Carnë Draug]

On 14 March 2018 at 12:30, edmund ronald <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> I understand the arguments and support the decision, but generally I
> believe that top-level argument defaults should remain fixed for the
> life of software, that is the Unix philosophy.
>
> Because user scripts depend on the behavior.
>
> I have hundreds of users I am supporting who run an Octave launch
> script.
>
> Edmund

Hi Edmund

It's not clear from your email why the proposed change would break
your users scripts.  If they were using '--no-gui' option, then it
will just be ignored and work as before.  If they had a GUI launcher,
then they needed the '--force-gui' option to work reliably and that
option continues to work (it is doing the same as the new '--gui'
option).

Also, I'm not sure about that being anywhere on the Unix philosophy.
However, there is the whole rule of least surprise which asks for sane
defaults and we had the wrong default because it was not suitable for
any of the cases.  GUI launchers still needed the '--force-gui'
option, and cli users needed the '--no-gui' option.

Carnë