On Mon, Sep 25, 2023 at 09:05:40PM +0200, Rudolf Leitgeb wrote: > If you document a switch, you are basically required to keep that > functionality around forever. Given that the OpenBSD devs don't like > these --options all that much, I don't see that happening. Submitting > a patch won't change that. > > IMHO there's nothing wrong, if software can do more than its > documentation shows. It's not like it breaks documented behavior.
Sometimes we're the other guy. I regularly look at other people's tools, trying to figure out what they implement, what they use. Case in point: I added .VARIABLES to our make. It didn't come out of nowhere. It is a documented feature of gnu-make, so I reused the exact same name. I did locate it in the documentation first, because it is documented. I also routinely look at what pkgsrc and freebsd are doing, just so we can grab good ideas from them. Sometimes I even write portable software. Figuring out what goes wrong based on a user's bug report on a system that you don't have is always fun. It is way more fun when you can actually figure it out straight from the documentation. Otherwise, you get to have the fun to try and reproduce their installation.
