Deprecating port list

[Neil]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 11:10 AM, Joshua Root <jmr at macports.org> wrote:

> Jay Levitt wrote:
> > Rainer Müller wrote:
> >> This is basically 'port outdated'. What would be the use of this if it
> >> is so similar?
> >
> > I think "port list" could/should be an alias for "port outdated".  I'm
> not
> > usually a fan of synonyms, but "list" is a basic function, provided by
> yum,
> > gem, and quite probably others.  Sure, you can document it in the wiki,
> but
> > why force users to look something up and type a different command when
> you
> > already know what they mean?
> >
> > Is there a use case where someone would be displeased by the output of
> "port
> > outdated" when they do a "port list", and where they'd be more pleased to
> > see "Please see the documentation" or "No such command?"
>
> `port list installed`,`port list all`, `port list <specific port>`.
>
> Having commands just because users might try them doesn't seem like a
> good policy to me. As for the "we know what they meant" argument, it
> would seem that we don't, judging by the differences in what we think
> the command should do.
>
> I'm happy for list to be removed. If it stays, its output needs to be
> changed so it's clear what it is showing, and so 'list installed' does
> something sensible. One possibility would be to have two labelled
> columns, one for the available version and one for the installed
> versions of each port.
>

I'm with Josh here (more or less):
It seems like rather than remove port list, just add a couple lines
indicating what is going on; maybe column headers and one line saying
"Showing all available ports." or "Showing all installed ports."  Dump those
to stderr so people can still do easy piping and parsing.
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