Re: [Gpsbabel-code] Argument types

[Robert L. <rob...@us...>]

Ron Parker wrote:
> I've just committed a fairly wide patch that adds an argument type to
> the arglist_t definition.  At the moment, it's only used to decide
> whether to add (required) on to the end of an argument in the -h listing.

I'd flirted with that idea but got all bogged down in cases where things
are an enumerated set that's only known at runtime and picklists so on.
But you're right that we can offer more help than we do now.


> The only user-evident change from this patch is in the help screen.  I
> did not change the -^ or -% options because I'm afraid that would break
> gpsbabelfront, 

In my day job, one of the things I spend a lot of time thinking about
is versioned interfaces.  I might not have said it on the list, but
I did add versioning to those to arguments some time ago when I was
considering adding some stuff that I was pretty sure would "break" the
existing front ends.  The premise is that what's there today is version
zero and is what you get if you don't specify a version.  If we change
the format of the emitted lines, we call that "version 1", add entries
in disp_{formats,filters} and tell the gooey thingy to call -^1 or -%1
and everybody stays happy.

> and I don't know whether there's anyone who'd be prepared to fix that
> if it happened.

There was another guy (Thorsten?) that was working on another Windows
front end that included track and route support, but I don't know where
we are with that.  I remember asking for some changes to be made, but
can't find that it's been resubmitted.

RJL