Subject: Re: [PATCH] git-am: error out when seeing -b/--binary

From: Thomas Rast <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2012 23:03:15 +0100

Jonathan Nieder <[email-masked]> writes:

> Hm, on second thought, if people are seeing this message, I would
> prefer if they write to the mailing list so we can find out about it.
> So I really would rather see this say
>
> 	--binary)
> 		: ;;
>
> and have "-b" completely unrecognized, without any words in our
> defense except for a note in the release notes mentioning the option's
> removal and that it has been an unadvertised backward-compatibility
> no-op since 1.6.0.

I'd hate doing that, mostly because other projects got me really angry
about similar issues, e.g., 71c020c (Disable asciidoc 8.4.1+ semantics
for `{plus}` and friends, 2009-07-25).

By the time I knew what the problem was, I figured posting anywhere was
useless since the change was already in the wild, and thus needed
working around on our end; and all I could possibly post was an angry
letter saying how unhappy I was about their work.

I didn't, and worked around it.  But that was after a lot of frustrated
investigation.  So I'd rather not do the same to our unlucky users.

-- 
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch