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Transition to "sane" command line option treatment

From: Daniel Stenberg <daniel_at_haxx.se>
Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2008 11:10:49 +0200 (CEST)

Hey

One of the not to good behaviors of curl is how many of the command line
options work when being repeated: toggling on/off.

We've got bug reports about this in the past and I know for a fact that this
behavior has burnt more than one guy who's tried to set default options for
curl in their .curlrc etc. When they then re-use the same option on the
command line or in a script, it effectively disables the option again...

I'd like this corrected. I want people to be able to explicitly enable and
disable features with the command line options. I think the toggling is very
rarely useful and something we can just abandon - unless we can figure out a
way to keep it for backwards compatibility when we introduce the new behavior.

I'm willing to sacrifize some backwards compatibility to get this done, but I
would of course like to hurt as few users as possible.

I'm very interested to get ideas and feedback from you guys on how we can
accomplish this!

My first thoughts on how to do this, is simply to convert all the current
options to _enable_ options and then introduce a new concept that negates the
option. Like -v or --verbose to enable verbose, and --no-verbose to disable
verbose.

Any bright ideas?

-- 
  / daniel.haxx.se
Received on 2008-06-03