Re: [PATCH] chroot,comm,join: fix usage options style

[Arman Absalan]

I understand Bernhard's concerns, and I have no ideas for improvement at
this time on the current design. But Pádraig's idea solves the problem.
I can scrutiny and develop an example to talk about and decide on.
If you think it will be useful, I will be happy to start.
In the end, I checked man-pages and realized descriptions start from the
next line when they cannot be in their own place(8 char from the
beginning). The type of options does not make a difference. for example df
--sync, --help

Thank you so much
Arman Absalan

On Tue, Dec 8, 2020 at 9:29 PM Pádraig Brady <P@draigbrady.com> wrote:

> On 08/12/2020 17:12, Bernhard Voelker wrote:
> > On 12/8/20 12:49 AM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> >> As it happens we're currently working on a more general solution
> >> to alignment of --help output, which should address this.
> >
> > Yes, the idea is to output the usage texts in 3 columns: short option,
> > long option and description.  The question is if such automatic alignment
> > would lead to a nicely readable text.  The problem starts with:
> > - short options having arguments,
> > - several short options for the same thing: rm -r,-R
> > - several long options for the same thing: --quiet, --silent
> > etc.
> >
> > Thus said, after fixing the above it would be hard to get better results
> > with automatic, columnar alignment without loosing too much space.
> >
> > In that regard, the programs chroot, comm and join are just violating
> > the status quo: they do not align long-only options properly.
> > Therefore, I'm 60:40 to start with Arman's patches, yet fixing
> > the indentation of the description column in join and comm: see
> > attached (squashed) patch.
> >
> > The only thing which is still a bit annoying is that the indentation
> > of the long option and the description via the HELP_OPTION_DESCRIPTION
> > and VERSION_OPTION_DESCRIPTION macros do not match that of the program.
> > We could address this by passing the number of necessary spaces as
> > parameters to the macros (and maybe change them into functions).
> >
> > WDYT?
>
> wrt the auto alignment,
> I was considering using similar output to that of man pages.
> I.E. single char options have descriptions on the same line,
> while long options have the description starting on the next line.
> Outputting to terminal, we might also highlight the `--option` line
> to aid visual delineation.
>
> Feel free to push Arman's patch, as it does improve things immediately.
>
> thanks,
> Pádraig
>