Subject: RE: getopt_long behavior
From: Chris Morgan <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2003 17:48:16 -0500

I've never used a flavor of linux that didn't support
arguments and options in arbitrary(within reason) order.  I
think if you started forcing users to enter options in a
strict order you would be met with considerable resistance as
this restriction is unnecessary.  I'm not asking for every
tool to accept arguments in different orders, I'm just asking
ofr getopt_long() to accept reordering.  All apps that use
getopt_long() will then support argument reordering to the
extent that getopt_long() does, all of the tools I use on
linux boxes do so, including gcc and linker tools, without any
trouble at all.  This behavior actually used to be supported
in cygwin but was changed, maybe a year or a year and a half
ago.  I just wanted to bring the issue back up again to see if
cygwin tools could be made to work like their linux/unix
counterparts again.

Chris

---- Original message ----
>Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2003 17:42:57 -0500
>From: "[email-masked]" <[email-masked]>  
>Subject: RE: getopt_long behavior  
>To: [email-masked], [email-masked]
>
>Giving the impression that ordering of arguments is not
significant
>is not a good idea in general.  Although what you're looking
for is 
>an extreme, the fact that you can generally interchange the
order 
>of flags ( grep -i -c *.c vs grep -c -i *.c) does generate
expectations 
>for all tools.  This uniformity isn't going to be met by all
tools (like 
>gcc and linker flags).  So adding to the flexibility as you
suggest would 
>only tend to increase the inquiries and problems folks
currently have for 
>these kinds of tools.  I don't think it's wise to look at
making any tool 
>accept any argument in any order.  I expect you'd find this
isn't practical 
>anyway.  But, that's just my opinion and it ain't worth much! ;-)
>
>Reasonably speaking, Cygwin targets POSIX compatibility.  For
better
>or worse, conforming to this standard comes with certain
restrictions
>on behavior.  I can only offer the consolation that at least
since 
>Cygwin is open-source, you have the option to build it the
way you 
>want it, if you want it bad enough. ;-)
>
>Larry
>
>
>Original Message:
>-----------------
>From: Chris Morgan [email-masked]
>Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2003 16:29:47 -0500
>To: [email-masked]
>Subject: getopt_long behavior
>
>
>I orginally posted this message some time ago.  Having all of
>the cygwin tools lacking the ability to accept arguments in
>arbirtary order makes it more difficult to use them(I often do
>grep "string" *.c and then rerun with -i at the end).  Is
>there anyway to get around this without recompiling the whole
>cygwin suite from source code?  Is there still no plan to
>switch this behavior back?  I can't imagine I'm the only one
>that wishes reordering was supported.
>
>Thanks,
>Chris
>
>
>On Thu, Sep 05, 2002 at 04:52:01AM -0400, [email-masked]
>wrote:
>>I noticed that getopt() and getopt_long() aren't doing
>reordering of
>>argv entries.  Searching the cygwin-developers mailing list I
>found
>>that this is due to compiling with POSIXLY_CORRECT set.  Is
>there any
>>plan to move back to not setting this variable?
>
>No.
>
>cgf
>
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