Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm
List-Subscribe: <mailto:cygwin-subscribe AT cygwin DOT com>
List-Archive: <http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/>
List-Post: <mailto:cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
List-Help: <mailto:cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com>, <http://sources.redhat.com/ml/#faqs>
Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com
Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2003 20:16:10 -0500
From: Christopher Faylor <cgf AT redhat DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: getopt_long behavior
Message-ID: <20030130011610.GC3603@redhat.com>
Reply-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
References: <29950-22003132922425749 AT M2W092 DOT mail2web DOT com>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline
In-Reply-To: <29950-22003132922425749@M2W092.mail2web.com>
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.1i

On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 05:42:57PM -0500, lhall AT pop DOT ma DOT ultranet DOT com wrote:
>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! ;-)

I agree with your opinion but I don't mind adding an environment variable
option to control the behavior.  It will take a long time for this change
to make it into every cygwin package which uses getopt, though.

cgf

--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Bug reporting:         http://cygwin.com/bugs.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/