[getopt-sig] The bake-off

[David Boddie]

On Thursday 30 May 2002 1:22 pm, Guido van Rossum wrote:

> > There was some discussion about the use of conflicting options,
> > resulting from the practice of aliasing commands. Whether things
> > like "--verbose --quiet" were allowable proved to be a point of
> > contention.
>
> Hm, obviously the last option wins; it's a common trick to alias a
> command to specify a bunch of default options, and it's useful to
> override those explicitly by adding more options to the alias
> invocation.

So, do you consider that the rightmost options always take precedence
over others? An alternative viewpoint can be found here:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/getopt-sig/2002-February/000097.html

I would consider something like an --override option would be useful
for requesting that any previous options (possibly supplied by an
alias) be ignored in favour of new ones added at the command line.

e.g. mycommand --quiet --override --verbose

However, I'm not sure that this is the most appropriate time to
suggest such a feature, given that we've extensively debated this
in the past.

My suggestion doesn't allow individual options to be overridden,
either.

> > Do you want to see implementations of mechanisms for validating
> > types and resolving option conflicts as well?
>
> If you think it helps, sure.

It might make the playing field more level.

David

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