long / short options (was Re: start-stop-daemon does not recognise --start)

Denys Vlasenko vda.linux at googlemail.com
Thu Oct 18 21:00:53 UTC 2007


On Thursday 18 October 2007 18:41, Ralf Friedl wrote:
> Denys Vlasenko wrote:
> > Try this patch.
> > ...
> Do you think it would be useful to define something like this:
> 
> #define OPTION_HELP_TEXT(SHORT, LONG, TEXT) SHORT 
> USE_FEATURE_LONG_OPTIONS(LONG) TEXT
> 
> Then the options could be written as
> 
> OPTION_HELP_TEXT(" -v", ", --verbose", " Verbose\n")
> 
> and the middle Part could be included/excluded as necessary. That would 
> avoid duplicating the description for the "long option" / "no long 
> option" cases and make it easier to maintain.

Unfortunately, this will mess up alignment of text
explaining what each option does, as it depends on exact count
of bytes in options. Otherwise alignment by tabs often breaks.
--
vda



More information about the busybox mailing list