adding a new lib for more advanced argument parsing

M. Warner Losh imp at bsdimp.com
Mon Sep 27 04:33:20 UTC 2010


In message: <20100927012936.GA32352 at freebsd.org>
            Alexander Best <arundel at FreeBSD.org> writes:
: hi there,
: 
: looking at applications such as geom (g_*), camcontrol, etc. makes one realise
: that getopt(3) is clearly not suitable for handling such complex options.
: camcontrol.c even contains a whole paragraph about why getopt(3) is considered
: not appropriate to handle camcontrol's argument parsing requirements (that was
: 1998!).
: 
: why not do a vendor import of popt 1.16 e.g.? are there license restrictions?
: or maybe some other lib...

popt has an X11 license, which isn't a big deal.  However, it depends
on gettext, which is pure GPL.

Also, POSIX has a lot to say about command line parsing, and popt
doesn't quite match what POSIX has to say...

Warner


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