'tahoe run' and 'tahoe start' should be one command

[JeremyVisser]

Initially, I was slightly confused by the difference between tahoe run and tahoe start. Of course, reading the docs clears it up, but I can foresee getting the two mixed up in future, especially during late nights. :)

Generalising from experience, most applications either fork by default and have a flag to stop it forking, or don't fork by default, and have a flag to fork if the user desires. So it's a switch, rather than separate commands.

I suggest adding either the tahoe start --daemon or tahoe start --foreground switches. The former if you want foreground to be default, or the latter if you want daemonising to be default.

Not sure if it conflicts with any other switches, but -d and -f are choicy short versions of the above.

Any thoughts?

[warner]

I like it. "tahoe start" should continue to be the daemonizing form, but I'd be happy to see "tahoe run" replaced with "tahoe start -n/--nodaemon" (just like twistd accepts).

[JeremyVisser]

Sounds good to me.

[davidsarah]

I don't really see the advantage. Do people really find "tahoe start --nodaemon" easier to remember than "tahoe run"? If we added the former, we'd probably still keep the latter (for compatibility with user habits and scripts), and it seems undesirable to me to have two ways of doing this.

[zooko]

1. Familiarity: Jeremy Visser expected a switch to control this rather than a different command. As Brian mentioned, twistd has a switch to control this.

2. Self-documentation: someone who knows to run tahoe start might wonder how to run it without daemonizing, run tahoe start --help and see the --nodaemon switch. If we're not going to add that switch then at least we should add a sentence after the list of options in tahoe start --help which says "See also the tahoe run command.", but that seems like slightly worse documentation than an option.

3. After all, isn't it logically a option of the "start yourself" command rather than a different command?

[np]

Here is a three lines patch to support tahoe start --nodaemon.

This is done by simply relaying the option to twisted. The patch also sets the default umask since twistd --nodaemon has also the effect of no longer setting the default umask.

[exarkun]

"tahoe start" is now deprecated. Only "tahoe run" will remain.