On Saturday, December 23, 2023 5:02 AM, Peff wrote:

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

quoted

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

I don't see why 

git sparse-checkout -- --sikp-checks

would be the only way to get that typo into a garbage entry, to be consistent with other commands. Without the --, --sikp-checks should result in an error.

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

quoted

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.

I use sparse-checkout every day and do depend on it working predictably (although I would take a fix to see it work as above, with the -- path separator), so personally, I care about this a whole lot -- in terms of consistency.