Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2015 16:31:47 +0200
From: guyzmo <guyzmo+notmuch@m0g.net>
To: David Bremner <david@tethera.net>
Subject: Re: argument parsing refactoring round3
Message-ID: <20150408143147.GD5218@vilya.online.net>
References: <871tjws8w8.fsf@qmul.ac.uk>
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Hi David,

On Wed, Apr 08, 2015 at 04:30:38AM +0900, David Bremner wrote:
> I think a dealt with all of Mark's comments, even "notmuch help
> --help".
> 
> I ended up creating a new function for the places where we want to
> process _only_ the shared options (config, setup, and help)

I see you patching and repatching notmuch's CLI to improve it, and I was
wondering whether you had considered actually using `docopt` to generate
the CLI parser from the output.

It's possible to chain docopts to create a CLI UI very much alike the
git command, and it's more easily maintainable, as you're actually
generating the code from the `--help` page instead of the other way
around, making you focus on how you want the user to use the CLI only.

Here's the link to the C parser generator:

    https://github.com/docopt/docopt.c

it might not be perfect as is, but it could be worth trying out? I
actually never tried the .c version of docopt.

I had a more extensive experience with the python version, and since
then I totally dropped argparse.

    https://github.com/docopt/docopt.c

I even tend to believe that one could create a full CLI using
python+docopt to actually control notmuch using the python notmuch
interface… Even though I'm pretty sure some would yell at me and
want to burn me as an heretic just for suggesting that :-)

what do you believe?

-- 
Guyzmo