[Maybe the thread I was following up was too old, trying again] Sorry for responding late... was busy last 2 weeks.
On Sat, 17 Feb 2007 19:23:59 +0100, Lorenzo Bettini wrote: >>>> So I wish that gengetopt can have another option to show help for >>>> parameters in details ... >>> ... >>> This would require to add also another field in the option in the .ggo >>> file (for instance details="<very long help description>") >> >> hold the thought, don't finalize the UI yet please, because I think the >> current approach is not the best way to allow user to specify detail helps >> like this: >> [...] >> This again, requires users to specify multi-line nicely formatted text >> in gengetopt configuration file. IMHO, the best way to handle this, is >> to use a brand new format -- use xml. > > I've just realized that probably this is not well documented: option > description in the .ggo file can span more lines: > > option "foo" i > "foo option" > int > optional > [...] > > As for xml, well... I think it's really a great technology for data > exchange, truly great! But it's far from human readability. Probably > this is only my opinion (actually shared also by others as far as I > know); e.g., I find the xml code above more unreadable than the original > configuration code (just like as I prefer write a Makefile rather than > an ant file). gengetopt really grows very fast. Looking back on my request that's several months ago, and looking at the current feature in gengetopt that allows nicely formatted multi-line text, the xml format is not a must any more. Hope that we will have the 'details="<very long help description>"' option soon. Please also add an option --show-detailed-help or something apart from the --show-help option, so as to show such detailed help. I'm really excited to anticipate that the "details" option be implemented. Because, after that, the gengetopt will no longer generate getopt code only any more -- it can generate man pages as well! The beauty of generating man pages is that we don't need to fiddle with man page format ourselves. There is already a good tools for it -- AsciiDoc http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/ I've been using asciidoc for quite a while and highly recommend it. You just format plain text file according to its simple and clear format, it will handle the rest of html/manpage generation for you. If you want to skim through what it is capable of, check out my AsciiDoc Markup Syntax Quick Summary http://xpt.sourceforge.net/techdocs/nix/asciidoc-syn/ascs01-AsciiDocMarkupSyntaxQuickSummary/ The actually reason that I requested xml format config file is that, I was hoping that gengetopt to be the de-factor all purpose program doc generation tool. I.e., not only to generate getopt code and man pages for C program, but all other programs as well -- Currently, the .ggo format is "proprietary" to gengetopt. Forgive me not being able to choose a better word, I mean, if we use xml format config file, all the other language can use the file as well, e.g., Perl, Python. For example, if the config file is in xml format, then an experienced Perl programmer can write a script to generate code to use Getopt::Long in less than half a day. And I can adapt such script to generate shell script that use gnu getopt in less than half a day as well. Generating asciidoc format file for manpage generation will be less than an hour. I believe the same time frame applies to Python too, but I don't know Python myself. Well, that's my ambitious goal. But if there is no such request currently, there is no point maintaining two interfaces now. However, if one day when you do think it is time for the xml format config file, post to mlist and cc my sourceforge.net account <at> suntong001. I'd like to help. I had experience with parsing xml in c code before, using the existing c lib. It's quite trivial. I bet doing it again with apache's C++ lib would be even more simpler. Cheers Tong -- Tong (remove underscore(s) to reply) http://xpt.sf.net/techdocs/ http://xpt.sf.net/tools/ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Help-gengetopt mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-gengetopt
