[petsc-dev] configure usability

[Barry Smith]

  In the --help mode you print all valid options, thus you can generate this list of all valid options. So at the conclusion of the run you could just take all the user provide options and make sure they are in that list?

   Barry

On Sep 1, 2010, at 6:56 AM, Matthew Knepley wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 12:55 PM, Jed Brown <jed at 59a2.org> wrote:
> Two thoughts:
> 
> 1. Systematic deprecation system:
> 
>  --with-shared doesn't give any errors today, but the option goes
>  unused (because it's now spelled --with-shared-libraries).  I'd like
>  to see either (a) recognize the old spelling but warn of deprecation,
>  or (b) error giving the new spelling.  This seems easy to do by
>  updating help.addArgument.
> 
> Good idea. Will do it.
>  
> 2. It's common to misspell options, difflib is part of the standard library
>  (from 2.3)
> 
>    http://docs.python.org/library/difflib.html#difflib.get_close_matches
> 
>  and would enable a warning like
> 
>  The option "--with-shard-libaries" was not used, maybe you meant "--with-shared-libraries".
> 
>  Configure is imperative (as opposed to declarative, or with all
>  options identified and available very early) so I don't think it's
>  feasible to provide comprehensive misspelled options help immediately,
>  but at least the unused options could be listed at the end.  This
>  ought to just be a matter of having argDB log accesses, then at the
>  end, take all entries that were never accessed and compute Levenshtein
>  distance to the options that were accessed used to give suggestions.
> 
> The first part, putting in access logging, has been on the list for a long time.
> We need to do it, but its a bit of programming.
>  
>  I'm not sure what to do if configure errors out early, it might be
>  hitting an error _because_ of an unused option, but there may be lots
>  of unused options at this stage (that are valid and really will be
>  used later).
> 
> This is not really soluble now I think.
> 
>    Matt
>  
> 
> Jed
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead.
> -- Norbert Wiener

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