Let me just chime in here as someone who recently started using pywikibot.

I was very confused by the argument passing style, especially the use of a colon to delimit the name of the argument from its value. I questioned why it was like this and thought about how it would be nicer if it followed standard UNIX practice.

However, thinking rationally about this, there are a number of existing users and existing scripts which call pywikibot with the arguments the way they are. Forcing a migration is not feasible. And maintaining two separate methodologies for passing arguments is likely to introduce risk and bugs, without much benefit (since those who already pass the arguments the current way will just keep on doing so).

Thanks,

-Travis

On 25 August 2014 12:14, Merlijn van Deen <valhallasw@arctus.nl> wrote:

On 25 August 2014 13:50, Amir Ladsgroup <ladsgroup@gmail.com> wrote:

No, zip and rar both use standard system (note that -r is standard, -recurse is not)

No, they don't (but I was also wrong in saying we use the same system they do). Zip has a concept of 'short' and 'long' options, but not in the same sense unix programs do. For zip -dc is very different than zip -d -c, while in the unix way, la -la is equivalent to ls -l -a.

Rar doesn't have a concept of 'long' options - it has various lengths of options, all starting with a single dash, /and/ commands that do not take a dash.

About the leaning system, I think we can keep compatibility for a while and start deprecate them then. and It's easier to use -p instead of -page ;)
Is it? Or is it instead of -prefixindex? Or instead of -put_throttle? And even if it were easier to use, I don't find that a very convincing argument to force people to change their habits.

Merlijn

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