From: Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se>
Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:07:35 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH 5/7] parse-opt: fake short strings for callers to believe in.
Message-ID: <48625F37.8030808@op5.se>
In-Reply-To: <20080624192634.GA9189@artemis.madism.org>

Pierre Habouzit wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 05:20:28PM +0000, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, 24 Jun 2008, Pierre Habouzit wrote:
>>> If we begin to parse -abc and that the parser knew about -a and -b, it
>>> will fake a -c switch for the caller to deal with.
>>>
>>> Of course in the case of -acb (supposing -c is not taking an argument) the
>>> caller will have to be especially clever to do the same thing. We could
>>> think about exposing an API to do so if it's really needed, but oh well...
>> Well, if the other parser is _also_ parse_options() (ie you just cascade 
>> them incrementally in a loop), then the other parser should get it right 
>> automatically. No?
> 
>   Exactly. There are minor glitches wrt the help generation to deal
> with, but for pure parsing issues yes, it will work.
> 

Why not just provide some api-functions to return a strbuf of the short
and long options each?

parse_opt_short_help(strbuf *sb, options...);
parse_opt_long_help(strbuf *sb_long, options...);

That way multi-parseopt programs can get their help-texts done right
with very little extra work.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson@op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231