Re: guile-config: Command --help is not displayed when there are required arguments

[sirgazil]

 ---- On Wed, 19 Feb 2020 08:31:56 -0500 Alex Sassmannshausen <address@hidden> 
wrote ----
 > Hi  Sirgazil,
 > 
 > sirgazil <address@hidden> writes:
 > 
 > > Hi,
 > >
 > > When using "guile-config" for declaring my CLIs I've noticed that if I
 > > define an argument as non-optional for a command, then trying to
 > > display the --help of that command fails.
 > 
 > You are correct.  This issue arises because guile-config uses (ice-9
 > getopt-long) internally to parse the command line arguments and handle
 > all the usual gnu cli argument niceties.
 > 
 > However this causes a chicken and egg problem: to execute help when the
 > --help flag is provide we need to have parsed the cli options.  But
 > getopt-long throws an error whilst parsing the cli options as soon as it
 > detects a mandatory argument is missing.
 > 
 > This is not ideal.  The solution would probably be have to be to
 > re-implement cli argument parsing outside of getopt-long, or to patch
 > getopt-long to not throw on validation-error but to return an
 > error-structure, which includes the parsed cli args, but also any
 > problems it encountered during validation.
 > 
 > Dunno which is better at this point, but I'll log your report and my
 > thoughts as a bug against guile-config for now.
 > 
 > Of course, patches implementing either solution, welcome! :-)


I see. Thanks, Alex.


P.S.: I just noticed guile-config is also on GitLab (not just Github). I'll 
report issues there in the future.