PATCH: tidy documentation of ld command-line option syntax
Sandra Loosemore
sandra@codesourcery.com
Mon Feb 23 19:19:00 GMT 2009
Dave Korn wrote:
> Sandra Loosemore wrote:
>> [...] While the
>> "--option=value" syntax is already discussed generally in the ld manual,
>> and many ld command-line options are already documented that way,
>> several others are not. This patch fixes the documentation of those
>> remaining long options to consistently use the "--option=value" syntax.
>
> I would have preferred if you didn't actually conceal the existence of the
> "--option value" form but just added the "--option=value" form where missing.
> That might be confusing to anyone who is familiar with standard getopt()
> behaviour. Did you consider and decide against doing it that way for some reason?
I just played a bit with listing *both* the "--option=value" and "--option
value" forms of each command, as you suggest. I didn't really have any
particular reason not to do that in the first place, but having looked at it, I
think it adds a great deal of verbosity and repetitiveness to the documentation
and does not actually make ld any easier to use. So I would not recommend that
we do that.
I also note, BTW, that the manual is not consistent in using either "-ovalue" or
"-o value" for single-letter options. IMO, the former is somewhat hard to read.
How about if, as a compromise, I consistently formatted all single-letter
options as "-o value", and all the long options as "--option=value"? I think
listing all 4 possible format permutations for each command would be silly, anyway.
-Sandra
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