On Sun, Dec 18, 2005 at 01:42:49AM -0500, der Mouse wrote:
> 
> > I feel that long options such as "--requires" and "--required-by"
> > would stick in my mind better, but maybe I'm just getting old and
> > slow. :)
> 
> What I don't get is what's wrong with "-requires" and "-required-by".
> But maybe *I*'m just old and slow.

The difference is that GNU style long options (--required-by) can be
added to a program without changing the way getopt parsing works for
short options. It is backward compatible. -requires doesn't work if you
already have a -r option.

Just saying "no long option" is IMO dumb, a carefully named long option
is almost always easier to remember than a random short option. But
that's not really the point. Please keep in mind, it doesn't change the
way short options work and the amount of code is almost zero. To be
precise, if every long option has a corresponding short option, all that
is needed is getopt -> getopt_long and the mapping table. That's all!

Joerg