On Fri, 2 Jan 2009, Sascha Wildner wrote:
Joseph S. Myers schrieb:
The tools zdump and zic support the GNU-standard --version option (output version information to stdout and exit successfully), but not the associated --help option (output usage and bug reporting information to stdout and exit successfully). This patch adds such support. tzselect supports neither option, so this patch adds support for both options to it.
I've never understood the reasoning of the "GNU standard" (?!) behind this. Will not '--help' without this patch show the usage as well? Is it just the successful exit that is so important here?
It will show the usage with a previous "invalid option -- '-'" error, on stderr which is less user-friendly if the output is piped through a pager (which is a natural enough habit given that many commands have rather long --help output). If you support one of the options I think you may as well support both of them properly, and I think doing so is strictly better than the present handling of --help. -- Joseph S. Myers jsm@polyomino.org.uk