Greg Stein wrote:
>
> This is the AutoOpt thing, right? Somebody should tell the author about his
> poor choice on short forms :-)
I'll mention your ideas to him.
> I'd say:
>
> -v / --verbose
> -V / --version
> -h / --help
> / --more-help
>
> Nuke --load-opts and --save-opts. Possibly nuke --more-help.
OK. I'm persuaded it should be possible to ``allow'' client
programs to specify the flag character for the standard options.
Assuming you have looked at an example option definiton, I
think along the lines of:
version-value = V;
help-value = h;
And, perhaps, specifying ``verbose'' with:
#define VERBOSE_OPT
#include stdoptions.def
My theory for the --load-opts and --save-opts is this: Suppose a user
has an autoopt-ed tool that uses rc files. Further suppose that, say,
the project he is working on has a standard tool config file. How
would the tool find it? The autoconf/make/libtool suite solve this
for themselves in various ways. This method provides some uniformity,
even if nobody tried to address this before. Thus, the tool user can
add this to their make file:
mumble-tool --load-opts=$top_srcdir/config/mumblerc ...
and they can easily create such a file by:
mumble-tool --<all the options they really care about> \
--save-opts=$top_srcdir/config/mumblerc
the mumble-tool will not run. AutoOpts just dumps the
configurable options into the file and exits.
> The options themselves are obscure.
I'd like to fix that ;-)
> > So, maybe, all in all, people should just use the long options?
>
> Personally, I like short forms. I'm typing the darn thing, after all.
Personally, I don't like typing options at all, short or long.
I prefer to figure out how to make a tool do what I want where
I want and codify the knowledge is a shell script or make file.
> If Subversion has a bazillion options, then
> I think that we've done something wrong :-)
Not completely clear. Take the issue of what to do about "\r"
in source files. It seems reasonable to me that some way be
found to tell SVN that the repository should ignore them. How,
if you don't make it a command line option? Per file metadata?
If you do use options, then how are you going to keep the list
of options small?
Cheers,
Bruce
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:11 2006