[Fab-user] Have you considered using the plac syntax for command line arguments?

[Matthew Honnibal]

I noticed this in the "fab usage and options" docs:

"Additionally, since this process involves string parsing, all values
will end up as Python strings, so plan accordingly. (We hope to
improve upon this in future versions of Fabric, provided an intuitive
syntax can be found.)"

When I started using fabric, one thing I noticed was that I missed the
interfaces I was getting from the plac library:
http://plac.googlecode.com/hg/doc/plac.html

An example from the docs:

 @plac.annotations(
    db=plac.Annotation("Connection string", type=SqlSoup),
    header=plac.Annotation("Header", 'flag', 'H'),
    sqlcmd=plac.Annotation("SQL command", 'option', 'c', str, metavar="SQL"),
    delimiter=plac.Annotation("Column separator", 'option', 'd'),
    scripts=plac.Annotation("SQL scripts"),
    )
def main(db, header, sqlcmd, delimiter="|", *scripts):
    "A script to run queries and SQL scripts on a database"
    yield 'Working on %s' % db.bind.url

    if sqlcmd:
        result = db.bind.execute(sqlcmd)
        if header: # print the header
            print delimiter.join(result.keys())
        for row in result: # print the rows
            print delimiter.join(map(str, row))

    for script in scripts:
        db.bind.execute(open(script).read())
        print 'executed %s' % script

if __name__ == '__main__':
    plac.call(main)

If run with no or invalid arguments, it automatically generates the
help message:

usage: dbcli.py [-h] [-H] [-c SQL] [-d |] db [scripts [scripts ...]]

A script to run queries and SQL scripts on a database

positional arguments:
  db                    Connection string
  scripts               SQL scripts

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -H, --header          Header
  -c SQL, --sqlcmd SQL  SQL command
  -d |, --delimiter |   Column separator

Now, there's any number of reasons why this might not be the right
approach for fabric, or why other people might think it's actually
awful. But I find it very nice, so I just wanted to check you were
aware of it as a potential solution.