Comment 2 for bug 1308670

Well, this is intended behavior as our commandline parser got stricter and allows/forbids options based on the subcommands (like update) instead of accepting and possibly silently ignoring all options for every subcommand confusing the hell out of users and developers alike.

Simulation (-s) is e.g. a option which had no effect for "update". And it has also semantically no effect as "--print-uris" already expresses the wish to do 'nothing'.

So, if this is just muscle memory, it might be painful, but I would like to ask you to retrain yourself. After all: Less typing for the same effect! ;)
If you happen to use that in a script, changing would be a good idea here, too, as said, in this case the behavior does not change at all, so you can remove it and still support any apt version as before.
In the (unlikely) even this is a very very important application hard-depending on this which can't be fixed easily, please reopen the bug and we will figure something out as a temporary workaround.