Greg Hudson wrote:
>
> Well, there are some implementation issues:
>
> *
> Of course, this point is moot if we use autoopt. I'm not
> quite sure where that decision lies; Bruce Korb and company
> seem very gung-ho about it, but several of the people who have
> previously done work on Subversion expressed reservations
> about bringing in a separate external tool for such a small
> problem. If we do use autoopt, then we can only support the
> more flexible approach if autoopt does.
I have it on good authority that AutoOpts would support it
if it were considered really important. We're talking 2 - 3
hours of coding (max). I would definitely not make it default.
POSIX does have that much influenct on me.
RE: size of problem
If it is such a small problem, why is it that so many get it wrong?
The reason is is that it is considered an hassle and a nuisance
and not all that important. The consequence is a hassle and a
nuisance for the users. So, do it right, do it once and make it
as easy as possible for others to use. The minor problem with that:
everybody has ideas about their favorite way option processing
should happen. If the tool doesn't do it with their favorite
preference, they roll their own and, likely, skip what they don't
want to bother doing. So, in the 8 years or so I have been twiddling
with this thing, I have likely overdone it. I haven't seen a better
solution though.
RE: availability -- You will find the AutoOpts
library shipping with the latest Debian distribution.
It is not completely off the wall. The library was
also designed to be pulled out and incorporated into
"client" products (e.g. svn).
> * Calling the getopt function multiple times is a no-no
> because it means failing to honor "--" (by itself) as the
> once-and-for-all-time option ender. Even gnu getopt won't
> look for options after a "--".
Interesting. I should add code to AutoOpts that will never look past
"--", even when reinvoked....:-) How else do you suppose it grew to
be so big? Not today, though. That would be a little harder than
reordering the arguments.
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:11 2006