Re: [patch] pg_test_timing does not prompt illegal option

On Wed, Apr 17, 2019 at 10:24:17AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Fujii Masao <masao(dot)fujii(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > On Wed, Apr 17, 2019 at 6:21 PM Zhang, Jie <zhangjie2(at)cn(dot)fujitsu(dot)com> wrote:
> >> I think "--" is a illegal option, errors should be prompted.
>
> > This is not the problem only for pg_test_timing. If you want to
> > address this, the patch needs to cover all the client commands
> > like psql, createuser. I'm not sure if it's worth doing that.
>
> I think it might be an actively bad idea. There's a pretty
> widespread convention that "--" is a no-op switch indicating
> the end of switches. At least some of our tools appear to
> honor that behavior (probably because glibc's getopt_long
> does; I do not think we are implementing it ourselves).

Yep, a simple 'ls' on Debian stretch shows it is a common convention:

$ ls --
file1 file2

FYI, 'gcc --' (using Debian 6.3.0-18+deb9u1) does throw an error, so it
is inconsistent.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

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