unregistration options

[Greg Louis]

On 20030228 (Fri) at 0914:22 +0000, Simon Huggins wrote:
> Hiya bogofilter,
> 
> On Fri, Feb 28, 2003 at 09:12:28AM +0000, Simon Huggins wrote:
> > On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 06:47:46PM -0500, Greg Louis wrote:
> > > If you're reopening the poll I vote you proceed as you had planned: -S
> > > and -N unregister, and -Sn and -Ns do the old thing.  With respect and
> > > sympathy for Dan's position, I still feel this approach is clean and
> > > elegant and will save more headaches than it causes.

> > Is there any good reason we can't keep backwards compatibility and make
> > the new thing use the new options?

Bogofilter's in early development, and freezing human or programmatic
interfaces this early isn't a good idea: it stifles improvement.  This
particular change is being considered because the -S and -N options in
their original form give less flexibility and are less intuitive than
the proposed replacements.  Backward compatibility is for when you
have a long-established, well-understood, widely-used interface so that
breaking it causes widespread hardship and confusion.  Even then, look
at the recent POSIX changes to head(1) and tail(1) -- sometimes
backward compatibility is deemed to be just not worth the trouble it
causes.

> Sure somtimes you need to break it but this seems like an unecessary
> change.

That begs the question under discussion ;)

> [ "Step #1 in programming: understand people." -- Linus                ]

Rem acu.
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