Bug: Inconsistent CLI flags style: `--no-tests` requires an equal sign, all others use space

[LeoniePhiline]

Description of the issue

Description:

Steps to reproduce:

1. Intuitively try to use the new --no-tests flag, e.g. --profile ci --no-tests warn.

Expected outcome

--no-tests warn should work just as all the many other nextest flags with values, all of which use a space between flag and value.

Actual result

It fails, with --no-tests requiring =, rather than a space.

Nextest version

cargo-nextest 0.9.85 (d5f93f64f 2024-11-26)
release: 0.9.85
commit-hash: d5f93f64faf6b1d1d425dce52019c14757c7b082
commit-date: 2024-11-26
host: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu

Additional context

Initially mentioned in #1646 (reply in thread).

[sunshowers]

Thanks for the report! I was wondering if/when someone would notice :)

So a recurring issue for nextest users has been mixing up test name filters and arguments to options. For example, imagine someone specifies --no-tests warn in a script, and a few months later someone changes it to --no-tests fail. But by accident, warn is left in afterwards, so it becomes --no-tests fail warn. All of a sudden, warn will start being interpreted as a test name filter, which is a bit spooky. (This sounds far-fetched, I know, but something very similar to this actually happened once around the --profile option.)

With --no-tests=warn, this has no chance of happening.

At some point I came to the belief that requiring options to be specified with equal signs will end up being less confusing overall -- in hindsight, I think nextest should have started this way, but it's too late to change that now.

So, at that point, it's a matter of consistency with existing options vs not making the confusion worse. I was hoping to lean into the latter, but I definitely see the argument for the former.

What do you think?

[sunshowers]

I've been thinking about this more -- I wonder if the default being fail mitigates the harm sufficiently, since the most egregious cases would be caught right away. Disambiguating between options and arguments feels like such a hard problem.

[sunshowers]

The behavior is now relaxed in cargo-nextest 0.9.89 -- binaries will be out in 15-20 minutes.

[LeoniePhiline]

Apologies for not answering in time to your question above.

I think you made a good choice, and I agree with your reasoning.