Re: Use of "?" for help has been deprecated for 8 years, can we drop it?

[Thomas Huth]

On 01/10/2020 15.17, Kevin Wolf wrote:
> Am 01.10.2020 um 15:06 hat Eric Blake geschrieben:
>> On 10/1/20 5:35 AM, Markus Armbruster wrote:
>>> We deprecated "?" more than eight years ago.  We didn't have a
>>> deprecation process back then, but we did purge "?" from the
>>> documentation and from help texts.  Can we finally drop it?
>>>
>>> I'm asking because there is a patch on the list that bypasses
>>> is_help_option() to not add deprecated "?" to a new place: "[PATCH v2
>>> 1/4] keyval: Parse help options".
>>>
>>
>> Did we ever issue a warning when it was used?  It's easier to argue that
>> it can be dropped if users had notice of some form or another.  That
>> said, I'm not heartbroken if we yank it immediately instead of letting
>> it live for 2 more releases.
> 
> A deprecation warning for a help option would somehow feel strange.
> 
> I would consider this a human-only interface that can be changed at
> will, like HMP syntax.

I'm not so sure ... for example we use "-device help" in the qemu-iotest
scripts, so other people out there might use "-device ?" in their
scripts, too, to check for the availability of devices... so IMHO we
should follow the deprecation process properly here.

 Thomas