Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Swap 'v'|'V' options for editcap and mergecap

From: Gerald Combs <gerald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2021 18:47:32 -0700
I'm not sure if we've ever swapped flags, but Wireshark's "-m" flag was marked as deprecated prior to the 2.2 release (bcae998048) and removed prior to 2.4 (37252634c4). I don't have any objections to doing something similar for the "-v" and "-V" flags.

On 10/16/21 11:35 AM, chuck c wrote:
Is there any precedent for changing command line options after a program has been in production for some time?

Swapping "v" and "V" for editcap and mergecap would bring them in line with the other binaries for calling show_version().
And also align with the verbose option ('V') for tshark and tfshark.
(little disruption depending on how many scripts exist that use these commands)

Another approach would be to drop "-v" for version and only support "--version" as tcpdump does:
https://www.tcpdump.org/manpages/tcpdump.1.html <https://www.tcpdump.org/manpages/tcpdump.1.html>
(big disruption since it's muscle memory to have Q&A people run "wireshark -v" and paste the output)

https://code.wireshark.org/review/#/c/2489/ <https://code.wireshark.org/review/#/c/2489/>
Add command-line argument to request the version to a number of the utilities.

https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark/-/commit/3773a756 <https://gitlab.com/wireshark/wireshark/-/commit/3773a756>

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