>>>>> "Alexandre" == Alexandre Oliva <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>> Yep, I'm in favor of removing all the --a* etc. it makes it
>> uselessly ambiguous, and short options are a better means to
>> abbreviate. And trying to support exact abbreviations, as is done
>> in configure, is an additional tedious maintenance nightmare.
Alexandre> Agreed. But beware that this decision goes against the GNU
Alexandre> Coding Standards.
Yes. It's only for sake of simplicity of the maintenance that I want
to avoid this. It's a real nightmare to walk that road, since
basically each time you add/remove/alter an option, you have to
rethink the whole option processing.
Alexandre> I guess we should have an m4sh (or m4sugar?) macro to
Alexandre> expand:
Alexandre> m4_case_longopt([foo])
Alexandre> to
Alexandre> --foo | --fo | --f
Alexandre> and
Alexandre> m4_case_longoptarg([foo])
Alexandre> to
Alexandre> --foo=* | --fo=* | --f=*
Yes, that's definitely the plan. In fact, I have even bigger
ambitions: some kind of a getopt which would understand by itself that
--version and --verbose share a prefix etc. That's one of the reasons
why I can't wait for Gary's M4, since I don't believe it is reasonable
to try to implement such a getopt in pure M4: a module would be most
welcome.
AS_GETOPT([help, h],
[# do your stuff],
[version, V],
[echo "$version"; exit],
[verbose, v],
[verbose=echo],
[m4dir, autoconf-dir, macro-dir, m],
[m4dir=$[1]]
...)
