[pacman-dev] Why not using the bash getopts buildin? Was: Removing deltas from repos

[Xavier]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 6:39 PM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Thanks for pointing that out.
>>> I only did a quick look at the outputs of a recursive grep for getopt but
>>> missed that it only found it in some comments...
>>
>> As makepkg shebangs for /bin/bash, why don't we use the getopts buildin
>> of bash in the first place, was there a reason to not use it?
>>
>> To make usage of it could be a reduction in code size (will look into it
>> if it's desired) and also would not be a portability issue IMO.
>
> It's not portable
>
>

a bash builtin should be the most portable thing :)

We used getopts in the beginning, but it was changed to gnu getopt
(probably because supporting both long and short options is much
easier), and then we had to move to our own implementation for
portability problem.

This should give you all the information about the history :
http://projects.archlinux.org/?p=pacman.git&a=search&h=HEAD&st=commit&s=getopt

When the portability problem was raised, I remember a long discussion
about the different alternatives. Like moving back to getopts (even if
handling short/long is ugly), removing long options (my favorite
solution) and using our own implementation (the way which was chosen).
Search the mailing list archives if you are interested.