Re: -V, --version -- deprecated?

Neil Conway wrote:
> Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> > --help and --version are the standard options that are supported
> > everywhere. In the era before we had long options everywhere, we
> > implemented -V as an alternative in some programs, in particular those
> > in and around initdb, because of the version cross-checking it does
> > using those options.
>
> Ok, good to know. FWIW "-V" is almost universal among the client
> binaries (not just those "in and around initdb").
>
> > At one point, long options where broken on some BSD versions. I don't
> > know what became of that, but if we don't have new information it might
> > be safest to leave things where they are.
>
> Can anyone confirm this? (If this actually affects any modern platforms
> it means that "--help" doesn't work at the very least, which seems a Bad
> Thing. So I'm a little skeptical that this is still a problem.)

FreeBSD had a problem with double-dash args but I thought that related
to getopt, and I can't remember how that fits in. Maybe we defined '-'
in getopt and said it took an argument and tested for '-help' and
'-verbose', but now we just check argv right inside main. I can't
remember totally.

> > Hence, the -V option is not the preferred public interface, so it's not
> > prominently documented, which may or may not be reasonable in minds
> > other than my own.
>
> Fair enough, but I think it's inconsistent to document it in some places
> but not in others. I think we ought to either declare "-V" deprecated
> (and perhaps remove the docs for it), or accept that we need to live
> with it because of long-options silliness and document "-V" as a valid
> alternate.

Agreed. psql --help certainly looks inconsistent --- only --help and
--version are long.

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