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Re: emdebian-tools : roadmap to a stable v1.0



On Sun, 2008-02-10 at 23:03 +0100, Michelle Konzack wrote:
> Am 2008-02-09 17:41:52, schrieb Neil Williams:
> > I'm not aware of many packages that use -V for --version - certainly
> > none of the emdebian-tools scripts have a short version of --version
> > (mainly because --version is little different to --help which has the
> > short versions of -? or -h).
> > 
> > > So better to use "-v" if 'emsource' does not use the "verbose" mode.
> > 
> > With the correction, is it worth supporting a short option for
> > --version at all? I can't see that it is going to be as well used as
> > --variant and IMHO does not justify a short option.
> > 
> > The other use of --variant is for emsandbox which (currently) does not
> > support --verbose although it could pass that to debootstrap.
> > 
> > It would be good to have a consistent UI so if there are comments or
> > suggestions for a convention that can be applied against *all* scripts
> > in emdebian-tools, I'll consider it.
> 
> found 25 (of 82) executables in /bin (binaries with errors removed):

less than 30%.

>     Question:  Should I repourt such errors to the package?

No. Why on earth would that be useful?

> also I have found in /sbin 31 (of 109) executables (binaries with errors removed):

Again, less than 30%.

> So I have in /bin and /sbin 56 of 191 executables which output to -V the
> version.  /usr/bin and /usr/sbin is arround the same ration (29%).

Hardly a convincing argument to use -V for --version.

Anyway, I didn't mean a consistent UI across /usr/[s]bin, I said a
consistent UI across emdebian-tools.

There is no consensus on what -V should indicate. The only consensus
really relates to -h|--help and emdebian-tools does support that
cleanly.

What is the point of a general usage of -V anyway? There seems no point,
to me, of having a common meaning for -V - I don't even see that there
is any point having a common means of accessing version information for
scripts within packages. In emdebian-tools, --version is part of --help
because it is pointless writing a separate handler just for --version.
It is even more pointless, IMHO, to use -V for --version when --version
itself is of, at best, marginal importance overall. The output of
--version in any emdebian-tools script is simply a readout of the
package version, I ditched separate versions per script a long time ago.
All scripts migrate to the new version at every release whether the
scripts have changed or not because the scripts are part of a package
that has changed. Individual versions caused too much unnecessary work.

Far more useful is to have a common usage of --verbose because the
biggest issue facing cross building in Debian is information, help and
documentation. --verbose is far, far more important than --version and
hence the short name should be used with --verbose, even if a particular
script doesn't need a particularly large set of output statements.

-- 


Neil Williams
=============
http://www.data-freedom.org/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/


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