Re: GetOpt formatting improvements

Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:

On 2008 Jun 30, at 2:00, Johan Tibell wrote:

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On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 11:46 PM, Duncan Coutts wrote:

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So if people think this is sensible I'll send three patches: 1. word-wrap the description to fit in 80 columns

I agree with others that 79 is better default. (Btw, finding out the terminal width is a IO action, so we can't do that. I like it very much that the API for GetOpt is pure.) Anyway, the maximum output width, as well as a maximum indentation for the option descriptions should be arguments to (new, additional) functions getOptExt and usageInfoExt, with the old getOpt and usageInfo being defined in terms of the new variants.

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2. use less padding between columns

Yes, but add a comma, see below.

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3. omit the args on short options when there is also a corresponding long option

I think this is an excellent idea.

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What does GNU getopt do in all these cases? I'd prefer if the programs I use on the command line are consistent in their `--help' display and GNU getopt seems to be the standard here. Trying to follow what other people do also makes shell scripting easier.

Options are indented by two spaces.

Whitespace shouldn't matter for parsing usage output, so we can deviate from GNU here. I think one space is enough.

Short options are separated from long by ", ",

Here we should follow GNU, I think.

and that column is left empty if there is no corresponding short option.

This looks nice IMO (and we agree with GNU already).

Option descriptions begin one space after the longest option that doesn't extend past column 30, and word wrap with wrapped lines indented by two additional spaces. If any options go past column 30, their descriptions start one space after the options without attempting to align with the other descriptions, except that wrapped lines are aligned.

It makes sense to have a _maximum_ indentation for the description, otherwise one very long option name completely ruins the layout. Following GNU (de facto) standard makes sense here.

Note --help and --version (no short options; also, they're boilerplate and apparently GNU getopt makes no attempt to match their descriptions' indentations with the other options, instead using a tab)

Which is a bug, IMO, we should not copy that. Cheers Ben