Two hyphens must prepend deep and update each to update the world emerge -v --update --deep world Leaving out a single hyphen emerge -v -update --deep world emerge -v --update -deep world causes emerge to spew out junk Calculating world dependencies - Parent: ebuild / sys-apps/man-pages-2.01 merge Depstring: sys-apps/man Candidates: ['sys-apps/man'] ebuild: sys-apps/man-1.5p binpkg: None \ Parent: ebuild / sys-apps/man-1.5p merge Depstring: virtual/libc >=sys-apps/sed-4 !bootstrap? ( sys-devel/patch ) !bootstrap? ( sys-devel/patch ) sys-apps/cronbase >=sys-apps/groff-1.18 nls? ( sys-devel/gettext ) Candidates: ['>=sys-apps/sed-4', 'sys-devel/patch', 'sys-devel/gettext', 'sys-apps/cronbase', 'sys-libs/glibc', '>=sys-apps/groff-1.18'] ebuild: sys-apps/sed-4.0.9 [this continues for a while and] [then it will atempt to emerge the whole world and every dependency!] emerge should recognize some basic malformed arguments and notify the user.
-deep -> -d -e -p -> --debug --empty --pretend -update -> -u -p -d -a -t -e -> --update --pretend --debug --ask --tree --empty
I consider this a bug because it's not performing as I thought it would and it was sufficiently non-obvious that I posted a bug about it. Perhaps emerge itself should regurgitate the arguments it thinks the user is passing to it in full English, as you have done below. (For that matter, every CLU should do this :-)
It does already. They are in the title bar of your term (if you have one and it is supported) as well as in /var/log/emerge.log.
Ideally, I think emerge should more intelligence about this. It should guess that if a user is typing emerge -v -update -deep world or emerge -v --update -deep world they really just left out a hyphen (All computer programs should have this type of defensive-style programming.. this probably something to to think about in future versions of portage.)
*** Bug 84779 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Can't tell that we have bugs in #84779 and this (#80752) report. This is why I filled report with MINOR priority. Anyway, still, my attitude is that behavior like this raises some problems: - using long options like --pretend, --update, --deep and others is frequent - forgetting one dash (-) is something that happens - probability that user with --update want to do: --update --pretend --debug --ask --tree and --emptytree all in one is very low - this causes waste of computer resources (think servers). Did you try "emerge -debug package_name"? User/administrator wanted to do --debug not to rebuild whole portage tree! This is worst scenario of this bug/problem. - new and more emerge options (one letter parameters) will bring more problems someday I suggest that, in the first pass, emerge checks is option given after two dashes (--) belongs to group {ask, buildpkg, ... debug, deep ... version} and do the same for all text after one dash. If it is correct option after (--) execute the command. If it is correct option after (-) print one-line error message (suggesting adding dash) and stop execution. Only if the given command doesn't belong to mentioned group (second pass) do parsing of the letters as in -pv -pvu etc. This is all about making emerge better. At the moment I am thinking this problem really is funny. Also I agree with Maurice on everything he said. Cheers
