Re: gengetopt, anyone?

[Simon Josefsson]

Reuben Thomas <address@hidden> writes:

> I notice no-one mentioned argp. (I also notice one of autoopts's
> testimonials says that it (autoopts) is simpler than argp!). But from
> a quick look argp seems rather neat; it doesn't need a separate parser
> and code generator, and it's available in gnulib.
>
> Why aren't I using it?

I used argp for several projects long time ago (and worked on the
initial import of argp into gnulib).  My experience was that the code
needed to support argp ended up being around the same size of a
hand-written parser a'la coreutils without its flexibility.  In
contrast, using gengetopt leads to less per-project code that I have to
maintain.  This is a better trade-off for me.  (At least in theory, my
issues with the gengetopt --help output results in the gengetopt code in
Libidn is still larger than I would want.)

/Simon