On Tue, Aug 03, 2010 at 12:45:12PM -0500, David Champion wrote:
> * On 03 Aug 2010, Nicolas Williams wrote: 
> > On Tue, Aug 03, 2010 at 02:00:46PM +0000, Grant Edwards wrote:
> > > On 2010-08-02, Nicolas Williams <nicolas.willi...@oracle.com> wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Right.  There's no good convention for "end of list of arguments to an
> > > > option".  There's only a good convention for "end of variable argument
> > > > list" ('--'), and since this is the closest thing...
> > > 
> > > And since there _is_ a convention that '--' ends the option list, it's
> > > A Bad Thing(TM) to use it for something else.  I think violating the
> > > almost universal convention about what '--' means is a terrible idea,
> > > but apparently we're now stuck with it.
> > 
> > The convention is that '--' ends the entire option list, not a list of
> > arguments to a single option.  Therefore mutt clearly uses something
> > other than the existing convention.
> 
> Strictly speaking, no: since mutt requires the -a option to be last,
> a '--' terminating the list of arguments to -a implicitly terminates
> the option list as well.  I think this may have been part of the design
> consideration.

Ah, well, if -a has to be last then you're right.  (Still feels icky,
but that's just aesthetics.)

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