[env-switcher-devel] [ env-switcher-Feature Requests-877263 ] options require fixed order?

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Feature Requests item #877263, was opened at 2004-01-14 19:14
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by jsquyres
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Category: Interface Improvements (example)
Group: None
>Status: Closed
Priority: 5
Submitted By: Jeremy Enos (jenos)
>Assigned to: Jeff Squyres (jsquyres)
Summary: options require fixed order?

Initial Comment:
If I want to use the --system or --user options... 
they&#039;re required to be at the *end* of the command 
line.  I don&#039;t see why this is necessary in the first place, 
but it&#039;s also not made clear on the syntax page.

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>Comment By: Jeff Squyres (jsquyres)
Date: 2004-03-07 17:15

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Done; will be in 1.0.12.

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Comment By: Jeremy Enos (jenos)
Date: 2004-02-26 19:05

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No inflammatory result intended of course.  Also, estimations 
of what is intuitive is arguably ALWAYS subjective, yet we 
still pay attention to it.  It's just feedback.  :)

As far as referring someone to the man page... bahhh.  The 
first thing a user sees is the big fat usage screen indicating 
their command was in error, with absolutely no mention of 
ordering... as you mention below, this is fixed in the usage 
info now.  (of course, having no updated OSCAR package in 
OPD, the endusers have little chance of seeing it)  Not a big 
deal though... might as well save the effort until cmd line 
options are parsed flexibly.

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Comment By: Jeff Squyres (jsquyres)
Date: 2004-02-26 11:40

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a) you made your [weak] point the first time.  I believe
that the switcher RPMs that ship with OSCAR now include
[more] explicit instructions about how --system and --user
must be at the end (although the original instructions were
also quite clear, per normal unix man page conventions).

b) I know that NCSA personnel don't like to read
instructions; all the help instructions for switcher clearly
state that the tag must be the second argument.  I don't
have any solution for this problem, unless you want me to
force the addition of a "--tag" argument to identify the tag
(then it can go anywhere in the line).

c) if your intent was just to remind me that this ticket is
still open, you could have chosen a far less inflamitory way
to do so (what is a "natural" tendency for you is *highly*
subjective and relative).

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Comment By: Jeremy Enos (jenos)
Date: 2004-02-26 11:28

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I'm sure when you fix this it will probably be for all options 
and not just the options I made example of... but let me just 
give another example of counter-intuitive use.  --list and --
show are both confusing here.

[oscartst@posic mpich-vmi]$ switcher --list
global
mpi

Note, that after typing this command, the next natural 
tendency is to "up-arrow" in the shell, type 
switcher --list mpi
on the command line, and list out the rest.  Hopefully the 
user is patient with the error in their face and will realize that 
they need to go to the middle of the command line, as 
follows:

[oscartst@posic mpich-vmi]$ switcher mpi --list
lam-7.0
lam-with-gm-7.0
mpich-ch_p4-gcc-1.2.5.10
mpich-ch_vmi-gcc-2.0.b3p1
[oscartst@posic mpich-vmi]$

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Comment By: Jeff Squyres (jsquyres)
Date: 2004-01-16 10:42

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After looking at the code again, I'm unfortunately reminded
of the ugliness that requires this.  It's not even worth
describing.

This is, of course, fixable, but it would probably mean
ditching using the perl AppConfig module that I'm using for
command line parsing (due to limitations of AppConfig), and
then overhauling how I do command line parsing in switcher.
 This isn't hard, but it would probably take 1-3 hours to
re-write and make it "just so".  I just don't have time for
that at the moment.  :-(

So, instead, I updated the help messages and man page (new
section: BUGS) that describes this limitation, and I'll
leave the bug open for the future when/if I have time to
actually go fix this.  :-)

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Comment By: Jeff Squyres (jsquyres)
Date: 2004-01-14 19:30

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I'll see what I can do here.  IIRC, there were some weird
issues that forced me to put in the strict ordering.  But
that could have all been while I was writing the first
version and just getting it to work.

I'll see if it's easy to do this now...

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