So I've been looking into restarting ticket #21 now that we have
argparse in python 2.7. The basic premise of the ticket was to make
our command line options use a standard library, however, since it was
opened (a long time ago), the command line options have become an
incredibly cluttered mess as more and more functionality has been
added. To that end, I think we should discuss some sort of uniform
design to command line options. Looking through what sorts of
arguments we already have, and playing around with argparse, I
personally came to the conclusion that sage would do well with
subcommand/subparsers (like mecurial, git, apt-get, aptitude, ...).
Some examples:
% sage ARGS # this would be for running sage scripts, or a couple of
oddball arguments
% sage notebook ARGS
% sage pkg ARGS # this would include spkg stuff
% sage pkg install # since install has some special flags like -f or -s
% sage test ARGS
% sage build ARGS
% sage {python,maxima,R,gp,...} ARGS # we can consider these programs
as subcommands of sage
Obviously, this is a fairly significant departure from the current set
command line options, and I'm not convinced this is necessarily the
best way to handle them (I don't necessarily see how to add in
debugging options), which is why I'm bringing this up as more of a
brainstorm rather than any sort of vote (that may be a future thread,
depending on the fallout of this one).
So as far as feedback I would like
1) If you think the above is the general direction we should go, any
thoughts on how it could be improved, and why (also, a +1 wouldn't
hurt, if you don't have any suggestions)
2) If you don't like the direction of above, but have some other idea
of how we could go about it, and why
3) You don't think we should make any effort to clean up command line
options, and why
For 3, I'm well aware that current users would need to relearn command
line options (which is the main argument I see for that perspective),
but ideally any new set of commands should be intuitive, and easy to
learn (plus we have the deprecation period for a reason). If you think
this is a more serious issue than I am making it out to be, please let
me know (and "I don't want to relearn the command line" does not make
a serious issue).
--
Andrew
--
To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to
sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel
URL: http://www.sagemath.org
