<pre>[ Sorry for breaking the thread, my mail server is down, I'm cut-and-pasting from <a href="http://gmane.org">gmane.org</a> ] Martin Pool wrote: > On 7 Aug 2006, Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy <at> <a href="http://imag.fr" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"> imag.fr</a>> wrote: >> Hi, >> >> I've filed a bug, but it might be worth pinging the list too: >> >> <a rel="nofollow" href="https://launchpad.net/products/bzr/+bug/55414" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"> https://launchpad.net/products/bzr/+bug/55414</a> >> >> Branch: >> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www-verimag.imag.fr/%7Emoy/bzr/bzr/bzr.output-option/" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"> http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/bzr/bzr/bzr.output-option/</a> >> >> 1908: Matthieu Moy 2006-08-06 output as a global option, -o as a short alias >> 1909: Matthieu Moy 2006-08-06 diff -o FILE implemented >> 1910: Matthieu Moy 2006-08-06 Implemented -o for "bzr cat" >> 1911: Matthieu Moy 2006-08-06 fixed import statements > > Thanks for the contribution. Can you say a bit more about why adding > > the option is justified? It seems like it's two things: Actually, what happened is that I found myself typing $ bzr bundle -o file and found that there were no -o alias (which is very common for unix commands), so I went and implemened the alias. Afterwards, I thought "while I'm here, let's do it for cat and diff too", but there's no strong need behind this. > 1. Using -o FILE avoids encoding problems caused by sending binaries to > stdout on Windows. That's what I understood. > But I thought John's approach of marking commands > with the encoding semantics would avoid that? I leave it up to John to say whether the -o is still needed or not. > 2. Having a -o option is just useful sometimes? Just one remark: bzr should be consistant, so either this -o should be here for cat and diff or it should be removed for bundle IMO (that's indeed the main reason why I implemented it). If --output is removed, it should be deprecated quickly, since there's already one release of bzr which includes it. </pre>Otherwise, writting "foo -o bar" or "foo > bar" is mostly a matter of habit. One argument in favor of -o is that it's usable by people who don't know how to use redirections, but ... -- Matthieu