On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 12:55 PM, Jed Brown <jed at 59a2.org> wrote: > Two thoughts: > > 1. Systematic deprecation system: > > --with-shared doesn't give any errors today, but the option goes > unused (because it's now spelled --with-shared-libraries). I'd like > to see either (a) recognize the old spelling but warn of deprecation, > or (b) error giving the new spelling. This seems easy to do by > updating help.addArgument. >
Good idea. Will do it. > 2. It's common to misspell options, difflib is part of the standard library > (from 2.3) > > http://docs.python.org/library/difflib.html#difflib.get_close_matches > > and would enable a warning like > > The option "--with-shard-libaries" was not used, maybe you meant > "--with-shared-libraries". > > Configure is imperative (as opposed to declarative, or with all > options identified and available very early) so I don't think it's > feasible to provide comprehensive misspelled options help immediately, > but at least the unused options could be listed at the end. This > ought to just be a matter of having argDB log accesses, then at the > end, take all entries that were never accessed and compute Levenshtein > distance to the options that were accessed used to give suggestions. > The first part, putting in access logging, has been on the list for a long time. We need to do it, but its a bit of programming. > I'm not sure what to do if configure errors out early, it might be > hitting an error _because_ of an unused option, but there may be lots > of unused options at this stage (that are valid and really will be > used later). This is not really soluble now I think. Matt > > Jed > -- What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead. -- Norbert Wiener -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/petsc-dev/attachments/20100901/0a128ee2/attachment.html>
