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[Bug-gnulib] ANNOUNCE: argp-standalone-1.2


From: Niels Möller
Subject: [Bug-gnulib] ANNOUNCE: argp-standalone-1.2
Date: 13 Mar 2003 20:07:25 +0100

For a few years now, I've been maintaining a standalone version of
argp. My primary use for it is for inclusion in the LSH distribution,
but it's useful for any package that wants to use argp and at the same
time be portable to non-glibc systems.

Besides portability fixes, there are a few other changes in my
version. The most important is that it no longer builds upon getopt;
the one or two hairy functions of GNU getopt are incorporated with the
argp parser. There are longer any global variables keeping track of
the parser state.

Another new feature (which has to be enabled with a compile time hack)
is abbreviations of long options, similar to emacs' complete.el. I
think that's nice, but it's such a big change to the user interface of
argp-using programs that it is currently disabled. If GNU folks agree
that allowing such abbreviations is a good thing, then it should be
enabled (and I don't think it makes sense to make it configurable on
at compile time or run time; it's just confusing if some GNU programs
take abbreviations and others don't).

New for the 1.2 release, besides an occasional bugfix and some
portability fixes, is a small testsuite that you can invoke with make
check.

The package builds a libargp.a, but the Makefile.* won't install any
files. I imagine that the main use of this package is to include it as
an AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS:ed sub directory in other packages, not to
install argp itself into $prefix.

Finally, I think it would be a good thing to merge the code back into
glibc, but I honestly don't know when that will happen. It's no big
deal, it's not a particularly time consuming to maintain the
standalone version, and it seems the glibc version have been pretty
stable too in recent years.

It's available at

  http://www.lysator.liu.se/~nisse/misc/argp-standalone-1.2.tar.gz

Happy hacking,
/Niels Möller

PS. I'm not subscribed to this list, so please make sure you cc: me on
    any replies.

PPS. Akim Demaille told me to post here ;-)




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