On 1 Sep 2010, at 12:25, Ralf Wildenhues wrote: > Hello Gary, Hallo Ralf,
> * Gary V. Vaughan wrote on Wed, Sep 01, 2010 at 03:59:19AM CEST: >> On 1 Sep 2010, at 00:41, Ralf Wildenhues wrote: >>> I personally find the M4SH_GETOPTS rather unreadable; it's a nice table, >>> but I cannot make sense of the entries, or review them, except by >>> looking at the generated code, at which point I'd rather just read the >>> generated code directly; after all, that's how we found several bugs in >>> the ltmain incarnation of this code. >> >> The documentation is in getopts.m4sh, just above the M4SH_GETOPTS >> definition. > > That didn't help to make it more readable, or cause less buggy code > though. Well that's because the shared code in getopts.m4sh is still getting exposure. I think that M4SH_GETOPTS is infinitely more readable and maintainable, and especially worth the effort of using and debugging if I am to contribute a variation to Autoconf's m4sugar libraries. Why maintain several copies of the same code if we can do it just once? >> Surely you're not suggesting that we continue to hand code, maintain, >> synchronize the option parsing loop in each of our scripts? > > Well, bootstrap didn't need one so far, did it? How much maintenance > does an option parsing loop need, once it is written? I didn't have the > feeling that that was a biggie on our list before that. Certainly not a biggie. But after using the M4SH_GETOPTS generated bootstrap script on my gnulib branch for less than a week, going back to the under-featured master branch version is already painful. >>> The --rcfile handling code mistreats quoting in the rcfile, and things >>> like multiple adjacent whitespace. >> >> Examples please. I haven't had any issues using this idiom in any of >> the --rcfile parsing in any of the shell scripts I've used this code >> with since I wrote it for cvs-utils (if memory serves). > > Put this in the rcfile, observe how the two spaces are flattened to one: > --message 'One sentence. Another sentence.' Oh yuck. Nice catch though. I've added a note to investigate that in my copy of announce-gen.m4sh incase I ever publish an --rcfile using shell script that pastes code from here in future. Cheers, -- Gary V. Vaughan (g...@gnu.org)
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