[jboss-as7-dev] CLI arguments convention

[David M. Lloyd]

On 04/19/2011 08:31 AM, Alexey Loubyansky wrote:
> It's not entirely consistent, at the moment. I'd like to get some
> feedback on it and what's more convenient for you.
>
> An example of inconsistency
>
> deploy my.war my_war_name.war my_war_runtime_name.war
>
> here are three arguments: the deployment, the name and the runtime name.
> The last two are optional but if you want to specify them, you have to
> know the order in which they should appear.

Another reason this is bad: to me this says, "Deploy these three files".

> On the other hand, there is, e.g. create-jms-cf which has lots of
> arguments and where it's impossible to learn all of them, so it looks like
>
> create-jms-cf name=mycf entries=cf/mycf ...
>
> In addition, it's kind of a proprietary convention. We discussed this
> with Max today and I'm looking into the GNU convention for command line
> arguments

That is a common convention -- for command line arguments.  For 
interactive command lines (examples I'm thinking of include 3com and 
Cisco network management CLIs, as well as commands such as linux's "ip" 
command which have widely variable arguments), usually it's more like:

create-jms-cf name mycf entries foo bar baz

Of course this falls apart for "deploy" unless you do something like this:

deploy file mything.war as myblah.war runtime-name yourblah.war

or something (i.e. make it somewhat more fluent and less shell-ish).

> And another point is the use of '='. Some command lines don't use it, e.g.
>
> deploy --file my.war --name my_war_name.war --runtime-name
> my_war_runtime_name.war
>
> and some do
>
> deploy --file=my.war --name=my_war_name.war
> --runtime-name=my_war_runtime_name.war

And some command lines support both :)

-- 
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