GetOpt formatting improvements

Isaac Dupree isaacdupree at charter.net
Wed Jul 2 06:40:09 EDT 2008


Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
> On of the points of getopt is that -fFLAGS and -f FLAGS both work 
> without any extra code.  Standard getopt doesn't do optional arguments 
> at all; GNU getopt handles -vn, -v n, and -v -- or -v -x (for random 
> options -v, -x, the former taking an optional argument; the latter two 
> cases are recognized as argument omitted).

and we say cabal uses a getopt equivalent to this?  Yet it doesn't work 
that way for me, in cabal-install 0.5.1:

 > cabal fetch -v 3 random
cabal: Failed to parse package dependency: "3"
 > cabal fetch -v3 random
Reading installed packages...
("/usr/bin/ghc-pkg",["list"])
Reading available packages...

(which, incidentally, I was doing to try to find out why 'cabal fetch' 
doesn't seem to do anything.  And failed miserably.  No messages, no new 
directories in ~/.cabal/packages/hackage.haskell.org/ or in ./  ... Oh 
wait, fetching uvector works.  Maybe it's because GHC comes with 
random-1.0.0.0 so cabal erroneously thinks it already has the source 
code that I want to look at, i.e. "for later installation *or study*" as 
`cabal --help` says?)

-Isaac


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