[Gnucash-changes] r12020 - gnucash/trunk - Remove redundant RPC variable

[Neil Williams]

On Wednesday 23 November 2005 1:08 am, David Hampton wrote:
> The argument parsing and usage help output should be correct for 2.0 as
> shipped.

Don't make me laugh. The CLI argument parsing, usage and help output of the 
entire 1.8 and G2 tree is borked and has been for years.

gnucash doesn't have a usable command line.

> That command line parsing code should come out now, not six 
> months from now.

Take it out and users are left completely in the dark about the removal of the 
option. That is simply bad design, David. It goes against the line of least 
surprise. We should not be fooling the user into thinking that the option has 
been accepted without comment.

"Oooh, gnucash has started up with --rpc-server and no complaints, no errors, 
nothing. It must be working, I'll try calling some RPC stuff." ?
Do we want users to get that impression?

Try this command line:

gnucash --delete-all-my-data --force-all --woo-what-would-that-do

Zip. Zilch. No messages, no warnings, no errors. Gnucash starts as normal. 
Nothing is done but then the user is not informed of this.

That is NOT good.

A CLI MUST ALWAYS inform the user if a command is not acceptable.
A CLI cannot simply ignore bad options and carry on.

GnuCash pretends to have a limited CLI but it stinks.

-- 

Neil Williams
=============
http://www.data-freedom.org/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/

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