Re: Formatting of options.

[Peter Simons]

Bastiaan Veelo writes:

 >> dnl Options:
 >> dnl
 >> dnl --with-Qt-dir=DIR: DIR is equal to $QTDIR if you
 >> dnl have followed the installation instructions of
 >> dnl Trolltech. Header files are in DIR/include, binary
 >> dnl utilities are in DIR/bin and the library is in
 >> dnl DIR/lib.
 >> dnl
 >> dnl --with-Qt-include-dir=DIR: Qt header files are in
 >> dnl DIR.

One approach I could imagine would be to define a special
type of ':' which has special semantics. Let's use '::=' for
an example. You would write:

  dnl --with-Qt-dir=DIR ::= DIR is equal to $QTDIR if you
  dnl have followed the installation instructions of [...].
  dnl

Then the software would know that "--with-Qt-dir=DIR" is a
term, and that all following text until the next empty line
is its explanation. In HTML, this could be marked up as a
<dl> definition list.

A slight variation, which looks nicer in plain text, would
be:

  dnl --with-Qt-dir=DIR ::= DIR is equal to $QTDIR if you
  dnl   have followed the installation instructions of
  dnl   Trolltech. [...]
  dnl normal text or next item or empty line

Here, a multi-line explanation would have to be indented. An
empty line could follow, but would have no significance.
Like I said, the only difference is that this one seems to
look neater, technically the two schemes are equivalent.


 > Is this realistic? Of course support for this can be
 > saved for a rainy day.

It is realistic insofar as that I could easily implement it.
I too think, though, that pretty-printing isn't the most
important thing to do right now. We already got plenty of
that. ;-)

Let me know what you think about the scheme I proposed, and
if you like it, I'll add it to the TODO list. Um, yeah, that
doesn't mean much, but at least in won't be forgotten. ;-)

Peter