[Discussion] Proposed transition from hyphenated commands to native v2 subcommands

[kairosci]

Currently, maintaining both legacy commands (distrobox-create) and modern subcommands (distrobox create) adds technical debt, requires complex symlink handling, and clutters terminal autocomplete. Moving exclusively to native v2 subcommand dispatch would align the project with modern CLI standards like toolbx and podman.

We could introduce a deprecation warning in the short term and postpone the actual code and symlink removal to a future major release. Keeping the status quo preserves compatibility but retains the maintenance burden, while my previous attempt to remove the code immediately was too disruptive. This issue serves to discuss if such a deprecation roadmap aligns with the project's long-term vision.

reference: #2151

[balanza]

Hi @kairosci, thanks for raising the topic.

I agree with your vision, and I can also confirm that the roadmap you sketched out is essentially the plan:

1. keep the status quo
2. provide a migration script/command
3. show a deprecation warning
4. drop the legacy commands

So I can tell you that you are absolutely on track, and we can discuss the implementation later on.

What we may not be on the same page, though, is the timing: in this phase, we might prefer to be conservative on the current workflows - we do not want to silently disrupt the setup of unaware people who just updated Distrobox. The promise of Distrobox V2 is to keep 100% feature parity, and we must fulfil the commitment. We are keen to handle some burden (i.e. the symlinking) if that helps.

So, long story short: yes, but no rush 🤗

[kairosci]

JFPI; has the deprecation notice already been added? Also, do we know the release date for the removal of the distrobox-* commands?