[Haskell-cafe] hledger subcommand detection, RFC

[Conrad Parker]

Hi Simon,

good stuff! this is the same approach that eg. git uses, it seems to
be quite flexible.

I did a similar thing for a C project called oggz a while back:

http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/ogg-dev/2008-August/001110.html

some other useful things you could add:

  * a "help" subcommand built-in to the hledger wrapper, which
basically translates eg "hledger help report" into "man
hledger-report" or "hledger-report --help" (depending on availability,
platform etc.)

  * an option to all commands that lists out all its available
options, to aid with shell completion. See the link I posted above
about the oggz tools for an example usage and a link to a bash
completion file.

I wrapped up some manpage generation code in a package called
ui-command, which is kind of orthogonal to cmdargs (ui-command just
deals with subcommands). Example commands are often useful, so I added
those, with validity checking, to hogg (a Haskell version of oggz).
Some related posts:

http://blog.kfish.org/2008/03/release-hogg-040.html
http://blog.kfish.org/2008/12/release-hogg-041.html

cheers,

Conrad.

On 26 August 2011 08:22, Simon Michael <simon at joyful.com> wrote:
> When I split up the hledger package, I always intended to make the hledger
> program act as a single front end for hledger-* executables. I finally got
> around to trying that, just pushed to darcs [1]. So hledger now searches
> your PATH at startup and offer any hledger-* executables as subcommands. To
> make this fully modular, so that options can be reused and third-party
> add-ons don't need to be baked in to hledger in any way, there has also been
> a rather extensive options overhaul, using cmdargs. Below is an
> example [2] of the new help output with all hledger-* packages plus a local
> hledger-report.hs script installed.
> I'm not sure if this is fully safe, cross-platform, robust, quick enough to
> be unnoticeable, etc. I have about 20 dirs and 4k files in my PATH. I
> haven't noticed a slowdown on macbook or vps, but have not measured. More
> testing of this on diverse platforms and machines, or code review, would be
> very welcome.
> -Simon
> [1] http://joyful.com/darcsden/simon/hledger/browse/hledger/Hledger/Cli/Options.hs#L-330
> [2]
> $ hledger
> hledger [COMMAND] ... [OPTIONS]
>   run the specified hledger command. hledger COMMAND --help for more detail.
>   In general, COMMAND should precede OPTIONS.
> Misc commands:
>   add       prompt for new transactions and append them to the journal
>   convert   show the specified CSV file as hledger journal entries
>   test      run self-tests, or just the ones matching REGEXPS
> Report commands:
>   accounts  (or balance) show matched accounts and their balances
>   entries   (or print) show matched journal entries
>   postings  (or register) show matched postings and running total
>   activity  show a barchart of transactions per interval
>   stats     show quick statistics for a journal (or part of it)
> Add-on commands found:
>   chart     [-- OPTIONS]   run the hledger-chart program
>   interest  [-- OPTIONS]   run the hledger-interest program
>   report    [-- OPTIONS]   run the hledger-report program
>   vty       [-- OPTIONS]   run the hledger-vty program
>   web       [-- OPTIONS]   run the hledger-web program
>   -? --help     Display help message
>      --debug    Show extra debug output
>   -V --version  Print version information
>
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