From: Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>
To: qemu-devel@nongnu.org
Cc: "Kevin Wolf" <kwolf@redhat.com>,
"Peter Maydell" <peter.maydell@linaro.org>,
"Daniel P. Berrangé" <berrange@redhat.com>
Subject: Use of "?" for help has been deprecated for 8 years, can we drop it?
Date: Thu, 01 Oct 2020 12:35:23 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <87k0wa1bf8.fsf@dusky.pond.sub.org> (raw)
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".
commit c8057f951d64de93bfd01569c0a725baa9f94372
Author: Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>
Date: Thu Aug 2 13:45:54 2012 +0100
Support 'help' as a synonym for '?' in command line options
For command line options which permit '?' meaning 'please list the
permitted values', add support for 'help' as a synonym, by abstracting
the check out into a helper function.
This change means that in some cases where we were being lazy in
our string parsing, "?junk" will now be rejected as an invalid option
rather than being (undocumentedly) treated the same way as "?".
Update the documentation to use 'help' rather than '?', since '?'
is a shell metacharacter and thus prone to fail confusingly if there
is a single character filename in the current working directory and
the '?' has not been escaped. It's therefore better to steer users
towards 'help', though '?' is retained for backwards compatibility.
We do not, however, update the output of the system emulator's -help
(or any documentation autogenerated from the qemu-options.hx which
is the source of the -help text) because libvirt parses our -help
output and will break. At a later date when QEMU provides a better
interface so libvirt can avoid having to do this, we can update the
-help text too.
Signed-off-by: Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Anthony Liguori <aliguori@us.ibm.com>
commit 585f60368f23e6603cf86cfdaeceb89d1169f4b8
Author: Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>
Date: Thu Oct 4 16:22:01 2012 +0100
qemu-options.hx: Change from recommending '?' to 'help'
Update the -help output and documentation so that it recommends
'help' rather than '?' for the various "list valid values for this
option" cases. '?' is deprecated (as it can fail confusingly if
not quoted), so it's better to steer users towards 'help'. ('?'
still works, for backwards compatibility.)
This is the -help option part of the change otherwise done in
commit c8057f9, since we are now past release 1.2 and free to
change our help text without worrying about breaking libvirt.
Signed-off-by: Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org>
Reviewed-by: Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Aurelien Jarno <aurelien@aurel32.net>
next reply other threads:[~2020-10-01 10:36 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 10+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-10-01 10:35 Markus Armbruster [this message]
2020-10-01 10:46 ` Use of "?" for help has been deprecated for 8 years, can we drop it? Thomas Huth
2020-10-01 11:20 ` Peter Maydell
2020-10-01 15:23 ` Christian Borntraeger
2020-10-01 15:45 ` Kevin Wolf
2020-10-01 13:06 ` Eric Blake
2020-10-01 13:17 ` Kevin Wolf
2020-10-01 15:04 ` Thomas Huth
2020-10-01 14:02 ` BALATON Zoltan via
2020-10-02 10:50 ` Gerd Hoffmann
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=87k0wa1bf8.fsf@dusky.pond.sub.org \
--to=armbru@redhat.com \
--cc=berrange@redhat.com \
--cc=kwolf@redhat.com \
--cc=peter.maydell@linaro.org \
--cc=qemu-devel@nongnu.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is an external index of several public inboxes,
see mirroring instructions on how to clone and mirror
all data and code used by this external index.