[Groff] long options

[Bernd Warken]

On Fri, Apr 14, 2000 at 04:57:35AM +0000, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> 
> > Turns out -help doesn't do anything useful in gxditview...
> > 
> > But something like
> >     gxditview -help -help
> > does 
> 
> Ha, xdvi, for example, has exactly the same problem...
> 
> The only clean solution is to introduce GNU getopt (volunteers
> welcome).  I don't know a quick fix, since handling `-help' alone
> isn't very useful.  `-h', `--help', `-?', etc. should also be handled
> specially, and it should be still possible to have, say, `-help' as a
> valid file name.
> 
> 
>     Werner
> 
I'm about to program a long option interface for groff and its utilities. 
It has GNU style long options like `--help'.  Hopefully, it will be 
implemented in groff 1.17.

It's almost done, but I would need volunteers who check all main files
source for all used options, being one-character short options so far. 
Then a volunteer has to read the documentation to find out its meaning
and then think about a suitable long name for each option.

There are some shell scripts with option parsing as well.  You can find 
the relevant files by running the following command in the groff source
directory:

find -type f | xargs grep -l getopt 

You can send your results in the following format:

Progam1

a-option a
option-b b
alternative-b b
help h
version v

Program2

etc.

We will try to retrieve common sets of options from that information and
try to provide a simple interface for using the long names.

You don't need to bother about option-arguments (: in the option string),
for they will automatically carry over.

Thanx

Bernd Warken <address@hidden>