new DIP41: dmd/rdmd command line overhaul.

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, May 23, 2013 20:42:47 =?UTF-8?B?Ikx1w61z?=.Marques 
<luismarques at gmail.com>@puremagic.com wrote:
> On Thursday, 23 May 2013 at 18:35:56 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > As long as the flags don't conflict, it would probably be
> > better to just
> > introduce the new flags and then undocument the old flags (and
> > deprecate them if
> > we want to actually work toward removing them - or just leave
> > them
> > undocumented if we don't want to have that breakage). That
> > would work just fine
> > save perhaps for a bit of confusion at first if both sets of
> > flags are available
> > and in the docs and --help. So, if we want to make the change,
> > I think that
> > it's obvious enough how to go about. It's more a question of
> > whether we want
> > to do it.
> 
> I think two binaries is cleaner, less prone to confusion and
> allows less cluttered help info.

It also permanently creates the confusion of what the difference between the 
two is. If we made the switch, the old flags would be marked as such and 
removed from the docs at some point in the future (possibly even immediately), 
so I think that the only confusion that we'd really have to worry about would 
be people looking at the flags used in current projects and not seeing them in 
the --help or documentation (though even if they aren't in the help, they 
should probably be in a separate section of the documentation, which would 
mitigate that problem).

Creating multiple aliases to the same thing is generally going to create 
confusion, and making one of them slightly different isn't really going to 
help. People would forever be inquiring about the difference between dmd and 
dmd2. I definitely think that it would be cleaner in the long run to just 
transition dmd if we want to change the flags.

- Jonathan M Davis