Re: -V, --version -- deprecated?

Neil Conway wrote:
> Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> > --help and --version are the standard options that are supported 
> > everywhere.  In the era before we had long options everywhere, we 
> > implemented -V as an alternative in some programs, in particular those 
> > in and around initdb, because of the version cross-checking it does 
> > using those options.
> 
> Ok, good to know. FWIW "-V" is almost universal among the client 
> binaries (not just those "in and around initdb").
> 
> > At one point, long options where broken on some BSD versions.  I don't 
> > know what became of that, but if we don't have new information it might 
> > be safest to leave things where they are.
> 
> Can anyone confirm this? (If this actually affects any modern platforms 
> it means that "--help" doesn't work at the very least, which seems a Bad 
> Thing. So I'm a little skeptical that this is still a problem.)

FreeBSD had a problem with double-dash args but I thought that related
to getopt, and I can't remember how that fits in.  Maybe we defined '-'
in getopt and said it took an argument and tested for '-help' and
'-verbose', but now we just check argv right inside main.  I can't
remember totally.

> > Hence, the -V option is not the preferred public interface, so it's not 
> > prominently documented, which may or may not be reasonable in minds 
> > other than my own.
> 
> Fair enough, but I think it's inconsistent to document it in some places 
> but not in others. I think we ought to either declare "-V" deprecated 
> (and perhaps remove the docs for it), or accept that we need to live 
> with it because of long-options silliness and document "-V" as a valid 
> alternate.

Agreed.  psql --help certainly looks inconsistent --- only --help and
--version are long.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------


Usage: psql [OPTIONS]... [DBNAME [USERNAME]]

General options: -d DBNAME       specify database name to connect to (default:
"postgres") -c COMMAND      run only single command (SQL or internal) and exit -f FILENAME     execute commands from
file,then exit -l              list available databases, then exit -v NAME=VALUE   set psql variable NAME to VALUE -X
          do not read startup file (~/.psqlrc) --help          show this help, then exit --version       output version
information,then exit
 


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