Re: philosophical question

On Sat, 2004-08-14 at 02:31, Eric O. Angell wrote:
> I've read through most of the optparse documentation a couple of times (I've
> mostly skipped the callbacks section since I'm not using any, but I've read
> the rest), and I have a question about intent that isn't addressed anywhere I
> can see.
> 
> What is the intended purpose of option groups?  I'm writing a script that has
> several different possible actions, each of which are affected by a mostly
> disjoint set of options.  It seemed to make sense to me to separate the
> options for each action by putting them in different option groups so that the
> help message prints in a reasonable manner, which works almost beautifully.
> The problem I ran into was that the different option sets are *almost*
> disjoint.  I have one option that applies to two different actions, so I want
> it to appear in the help message of each group.  I'm currently working around
> this by turning off the conflict handler when I add it the second time, but
> the need to do that makes it pretty clear that my idea is outside the
> philosophy.  Since there's no clear explanation of the purpose of option
> groups in the documentation (the "Dangerous Options" example is a start, but I
> was hoping for something more), I was hoping to get some insight from the
> list.
> 
> You're probably going to tell me that my script is behaving too much like tar
> in requiring a command as an argument, huh?  I've toyed with the idea of
> either writing it as several different scripts or letting it be called by one
> of several different names, but that just seems like it would increase
> maintenence difficulty.  The latter option isn't really feasible anyway, since
> Windows and CVS both handle symlinks poorly.

symlinking the name is a bad idea IMO. That said, I consider the option
groups thing to be a bug - but there are two different ways to address
it:

allow the option to be in multiple groups
allow the option to be added twice, one group each time, and with
potentially different syntax/type etc.

which fits your needs more ?

Rob


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