The Matter of Taste

While working on Svet, a Git and filesystem linter, I had a conversation with GitHub Copilot CLI about a flag. The tool checks files. We were adding automatic fixes. Naturally, I wanted to preview changes before allowing the tool to write them. The first suggestion was --fix-dry-run. I preferred a global --dry-run that could apply to both checking and fixing. Simple enough. Except checking already doesn’t write anything. What should a dry run of a check do? One answer is that a dry run prohibits writes. Run all the checks, report the findings, and leave the files alone. With --fix, calculate the fixes but don’t apply them. Without --fix, the flag changes nothing. That’s a consistent definition. It also makes the flag redundant for the default operation. I wanted another definition: preview the operation I asked for. # Check files. svet # Check files, fix what can be fixed, and check again. svet --fix # Show which files and checks would be involved, without running checks. svet…