Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v2] qemu-doc: Rework the network options chapter to make "-net" less prominent

["Daniel P. Berrangé" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Tue, Apr 17, 2018 at 04:32:50PM +0200, Markus Armbruster wrote:
> Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com> writes:
> 
> > On 17/04/2018 16:05, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> >>> For what it's worth, my "[RFC PATCH 00/32] Command line QAPIfication"
> >>> replaces the original parsing art by getopt_long_only().
> >>>
> >>> Completing that work will take some time, but once it's done, we can
> >>> (and I think we should) prefer double-dash for consistency.
> >> Since our existing parser accepts single & double-dash already, is it
> >> worth explicitly deprecating single-dash usage right now. So that when
> >> your code comes along ready to merge, we're already able to say
> >> "i told you so" and drop single-dash support at that same time.
> >
> > Serious questions: is _anyone_ of you actually using double-dash support
> > in daily invocations of QEMU?
> 
> I use both.  I readily concede that people familiar with QEMU probably
> use single dash a lot more than double dash.  I don't think we should
> get rid of single dash, unless we decide to bite the bullet and clean up
> our command line without regard for backward compatibility, as Thomas
> proposed elsewhere in this thread, and others proposed before, multiple
> times.
> 
> I don't entertain the idea of compatibility breaks lightly.  But our
> command line is genuinely nasty.  The closer you look, the nastier.

FWIW, I misread your earlier mail in this thread. I read it as 'getopt_long'
rather than 'getopt_long_only', so was assuming your getopt conversion
implied dropping the single-dash long form and allowing us to have distinct
single-letter short options with single-dash like sane apps do !

Regards,
Daniel
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