Hi Wolfgang,
In message 200802140620.15102.sr@denx.de you wrote:
I would still prefer the version with the '--force' parameter. Just my 2 cents.
I really don't want to have this, for two reasons: 1) U-Boot doesn't do "Do you really want to" confirmations, because these don't fit into the Unix design philisophy; 2) U-Boot doesn't do GNU style long command line switches (for several reasons, memory footprint being one of them).
As I hinted at in my other mail, git is my prime example of living up to the spirit of unix - and still many commands there, e.g. git-push need a '-f' to prevent clobbering costly changes inadvertently.
In my opinion your argument 1) is not true as it stands. Unix wants its users to be as productive as possible and typing two extra characters when ommitting them can cause hours of work is definitely in this spirit.
Exaggerating your argument I would ask why you do not work only as root on your machine. In U-Boot we do not have this "user" level of protection so IMHO it makes sense to have at least a bit of it.
It is true however that we don't have any kind of option processing, so probably '-force' wasn't a good choice to begin with. What about only using "all" as a "conformative" option?
Cheers Detlev