[fpc-devel] "fpc -h" and "fpc -i"

[Dmitry Boyarintsev]

On Sun, Nov 9, 2014 at 4:27 AM, Juha Manninen <juha.manninen62 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Sorry, my bad. We had a long discussion about this subject, Mattias
> thought the info about FPC options should be maintained in FPC project. I
> agreed because it is quite logical and makes sense. Why should help info
> about FPC options be maintained by some other project?
>
The problem is that this "metafile" is intent to be used by an out-side
"application" not an out-side"human". FPC as an application is designed to
be used by humans. If something is not "fpc -h", well humans would go out
search and ask. And they'll get their answer. But why would FPC team care
about something that's not in the intent of FPC itself?

And also, what about other other applications that Lazarus and FPC relies
on?
Like external linkers? The number of linking options is quite-quite limited
now.
And FPC provides a "-k" option to push additional parameters to the linker.
Lazarus IDE could provide a nice GUI interface for linker options two,
using a similar command-line parameters description file.


> Now it seems that my parser could became quite robust if "fpc -h"
> output is consistent.
> It can still later be replaced by your file + GUI if it brings extra
> benefits.
> We can discuss it later.
>
Yeah. That's the point I've made back at the discussion. Relying on parsing
human-readable data, is not enough.
Instead of spending time improving the parser back then, you could create
your description and be done.

So now, instead of waiting for the bug reports to be full filled that
making and "fpc -h" more consistent, you could just update the description
file for the new compiler features.

And trust me, some one will breaking "fpc -h" again and again in future.
Just because, then people are adding to features to the compiler they do
care about these features and they care less about consistency and
nice-looking fpc help.

thanks,
Dmitry
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