On Wed, 1 Sep 2010 12:56:30 +0200, Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> wrote: > 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.
Thanks. > > 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. Once you have access logging, the fuzzy matching is very easy, so more incentive perhaps. > > 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. Yup. Jed
