On Thu, Dec 21, 2023 at 02:04:56PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Right, that is the "gotcha" I mentioned in my other email. Though that
is the way it has behaved historically, my argument is that users are
unreasonable to expect it to work:

  1. It is not consistent with the rest of Git commands.

  2. It is inconsistent with respect to existing options (and is an
     accident waiting to happen when new options are added).

So I'd consider it a bug-fix.

So the counter-proposal here is just to drop KEEP_UNKNOWN_OPT and
deliberately break them^W^W^Wrealign their expectations?

Yes. :) But keep in mind we are un-breaking other people, like those who
typo:

  git sparse-checkout --sikp-checks

and don't see an error (instead, we make a garbage entry in the sparse
checkout file).

I do not have much stake in sparse-checkout, so I am fine with that
direction.  But I suspect other folks on the list would have users
of their own who would rather loudly complain to them if we broke
them ;-) 

Likewise, I have never used sparse-checkout myself, and I don't care
_that_ much. My interest is mostly in having various Git commands behave
consistently. This whole discussion started because the centralized
--end-of-options fix interacted badly with this unusual behavior.

-Peff