Drush vset setting vars as string

thats the best we can do with vset. if you really need non strings, use eval: drush eval "variable_set('foo', TRUE);"

That's a bit odd - the first example for drush help vset is drush vset --yes preprocess_css 1. One might think that would set the variable as an integer, but since Drush sets a string and Drupal 7 expects the variable to be an integer, this example does not work as expected.

How about this?

Same thing, cleaned up a bit and with a bit of extra polish on make maintenance_mode (plus docs and shell aliases for taking a site offline and brining it back online again).

Might as well make common things easy.

I need to look more closely at this over the weekend. In general, looks good. Meanwhile, minor comments:

We mention 'We don't support earlier than Drupal 6 or earlier' but Drush5 does not support anything earlier.

+++ b/commands/core/variable.drush.incundefined
@@ -58,10 +57,12 @@ function variable_drush_command() {
       'yes' => 'Skip confirmation if only one variable name matches.',
+      'exact' => 'Only delete the one variable that exactly matches the specified name.',

Should this be called 'always-delete'?

+    $options['state-def']           = array('hidden' => TRUE, 'merge-associative' => TRUE, 'description' => 'State definitions for core-state command.');

Whats this?

'state-def' is leftover cruft from a Drush experimental command that I worked on for a few minutes before realizing that it was unnecessary, as the use case can already be served by shell aliases. I will get rid of it; it will not return.

'always-delete' does have good alignment with 'always-set', but in the case of variable-delete, 'exact' will only cause a deletion to happen if the variable name matches exactly. For example, if you have variables 'foo', 'foo_a', 'foo_b' and so on, drush vdel --exact foo will delete 'foo', but not 'foo_a' etc. I suppose that 'always-delete' does match this behavior, but to me it seemed to imply that all of the 'foo's would be deleted. I could go with it if you thought it better.

I'll wait for your further review before re-rolling.

Looks good. There are two lines with only several spaces in them.

Committed.