Re: [PATCH 1/6] Add --gnulib-version and --news options to announce-gen.

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Gary,

* Gary V. Vaughan wrote on Wed, Sep 01, 2010 at 03:59:19AM CEST:
> On 1 Sep 2010, at 00:41, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > I personally find the M4SH_GETOPTS rather unreadable; it's a nice table,
> > but I cannot make sense of the entries, or review them, except by
> > looking at the generated code, at which point I'd rather just read the
> > generated code directly; after all, that's how we found several bugs in
> > the ltmain incarnation of this code.
> 
> The documentation is in getopts.m4sh, just above the M4SH_GETOPTS
> definition.

That didn't help to make it more readable, or cause less buggy code
though.

> Surely you're not suggesting that we continue to hand code, maintain,
> synchronize the option parsing loop in each of our scripts?

Well, bootstrap didn't need one so far, did it?  How much maintenance
does an option parsing loop need, once it is written?  I didn't have the
feeling that that was a biggie on our list before that.

> > The --rcfile handling code mistreats quoting in the rcfile, and things
> > like multiple adjacent whitespace.
> 
> Examples please.  I haven't had any issues using this idiom in any of
> the --rcfile parsing in any of the shell scripts I've used this code
> with since I wrote it for cvs-utils (if memory serves).

Put this in the rcfile, observe how the two spaces are flattened to one:
  --message 'One sentence.  Another sentence.'

Cheers,
Ralf