> On 2013-04-10 21:30, Walter Bright wrote: > I agree. The way to do it is to support both the old and the new ways for > now. Anyone want to do a pull req? > Also, this should be put in bugzilla as an enhancement request.
Let's agree on specifics before writing enhancement request, and possibly make a single one-time breaking change instead of several short-sighted ones. With type A being -offilename and type B being -of=filename, how about: 1) prevent any newly created flags of type A 2) migrate all A flags to B flags. Here's one possible way to achieve this (say in next dmd release): dmd -offilename main.d //works but generates a warning for now, and error after a certain time passed dmd -old_flag -offilename main.d //works and doesn't generate a warning. dmd -new_flag -of=filename main.d //works. After a certain time passed, -new_flag is implied Note, A and B flags can't be mixed, eg: -offilename -Ddoc=dir will give error, in all 3 cases above (ie for flags that are currently in the A style). 2b) Alternative: use a new binary name (dmd2) instead of -newflag. I don't like this as much somehow. 3) can we deprecate the current behavior where one can pass the file name without extension (main vs main.d) as source? Consistency is better than avoiding to type those 2 characters. I created a pathological case with main.d is conflicting with main.d.d (with different contents). Which one do you think is called when we call rdmd main.d ? Note, I raised a very analogous concern here https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/1871#issuecomment-16101987 regarding naming of object files in a flat hierarchy (see my example with dmd -c -oq foo/mod.d foo_mod.d) 4) The current strategy of rdmd is to treat as input arguments anything after the first source file: rdmd main.d myfirstprogramarg // a bit awkward, especially with optional extension it gets hard to parse visually. This is error prone, and inconsistent with dmd's behavior, which is: dmd src1.d -run main.d myfirstprogramarg //a bit awkward, need to split the source from the main file. I suggest instead something simpler, explicit and consistent, using -args as a dmd command line argument, that would just work as well with rdmd: dmd main.d src1.d -args myfirstprogramarg rdmd main.d -args myfirstprogramarg 5) currently we distinguish rdmd's arguments from dmd's arguments via '--' vs '-'. A better way IMO would be to have a special flag indicating the start of dmd's (or gdc/ldc...) flags: eg rdmd --chatty --dflags -version=myversion main.d Timothee Cour