On Tue, 20 Sep 2011 13:57:54 +0700 Ivan Shmakov <ivan@gray.siamics.net> wrote: > I wonder, is there a kind of reference of the common command > line interface conventions that the CLI's of the software > included in Debian should adhere to? One which is possible to support in all interpreted languages, all compiled languages, all toolkits and all software no matter how long ago it was written? No. IMHO it is far, far too late to worry about standardising such things because 90% of the other command line tools in existence depend on the particular idiosyncratic implementations of other tools. That is one migration which is truly not worth the pain. If this was really an issue, it should have been sorted out when GNU really was new. It doesn't even hold that tools in a similar space operate with the same conventions. About the best you can hope for is that the same developers use the same mechanisms with most of the software they write when using the same language because programmers are lazy. Switch from perl to shell or C to python and all that vanishes. It is just a pointless waste of effort to make them consistent when the underlying tools are not consistent, the language/library implementations are not consistent and the particular software itself has different requirements to the tools it uses itself. > One more issue is that some commands implement GNU long options > with a particular flaw that --option=ARGUMENT is /not/ accepted > as synonymous to --option ARGUMENT, which makes it impossible to > use the following short form: Other commands don't use either a space or equality operator, e.g. dpkg-buildpackage uses -aarmel but the chances of changing that now are zero. Too many tools and scripts rely on the current mechanisms. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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