Agreed, this needs a good cleaning.
I'd like to see a lot of the noddy `-foo sets bool foo, -nofoo clears
it'-case processing in a switch disappear into a central, new,
option-processing routine.
FWIW, I'm fine with that. But ... as long as we're making a list of
things that we should add to smatch(), here are a few others that would
be helpful.
- We have a lot of commands that call OTHER commands, and a lot of switches
need to be passed down. post(8) is the biggest offender here; a lot
of switches to send(1) are really switches to post(8), and when you add
a new switch to post(8) you have to add it to send(1) AND whatnow(1)
and whom(1) and probably one or two more places that I forget. Being
able to declare a list of arguments to post(8) that could be used by other
programs would be a HUGE win. I think this would require an extension to
smatch to make it work properly, though.
- Having a common switch that would spit out a list of switches that a
program takes and _whether or not they take arguments_ would ALSO be
a huge win. Why? Well, let's say you write your own postproc; it turns
out you need to know which switches take arguments. Being able to
get a list of switches and figure out which ones take arguments would
sure be useful for shell scripting (I realize you could maybe do this
with the existing -help output, but it would be a bit hairy and I'd
rather have something easier to use).
--Ken
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