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by Daniel Berger.
Original Post: Lost a follower
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I hate bugs in my code. I test, sure, but sometimes there are scenarios you just don't think of that you *should* have thought of. And sometimes users of your package will only put up with so much before they lose faith and move on.
I've had a couple incidents with getopt-long recently where I think I lost someone. The first wasn't so much a bug as unclear documentation and a bad error message. The second was, although not really mentioned as legal in the docs, a bug. Specifically, I didn't allow for embedded hyphens in long option names, e.g. --with-foo.
Why? I really have no excuse. I can only surmise that in practice I almost always use the short form if given the option, and so I didn't think out better tests for the long option names. I fixed it ASAP, but I have this feeling my reputation is now somewhat tarnished in that users eyes, and he'll probably be less likely to trust my code in the future.
Maybe I'm overreacting but it's a pretty sucky feeling.
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