Eric Sunshine [off-list ref] writes:
It's easy to be blinded into thinking that cat-file's new option
should be named --literally since it was inspired by the --literally
option of hash-object, but indeed it may not be the best choice.
Yeah, I wouldn't even say "inspired". It was envisioned as a
counter-part debugging aid, nothing more.
Is there any other way to make cat-file looser other than accepting
an unknown type name from the future? If so, then perhaps it may
make sense to give it a generic name that implys that we would
trigger such additional looseness in the future. But as the
inventor of it as a debugging aid, I would say a name that spells
out the specific way this option is being loose, e.g.
--allow-bogus-type
or with s/bogus/unknown/, best describes what it currently does.
Thanks.