Re: [XBoard-devel] file associations / positional arguments

[Arun Persaud]

Hi

> The advantage of the current system, where a 'section' is itself a
> string option,
> is that it can be easily set from the command line.

I wonder though if this is really necessary, it's not that hard to open
a text file and do the changes there. I can see that is is helpful for
testing, but does the user really needs this option?

>[...]
> For this reason I already supplied alternatives -at and -opt. Not sure
> how the
> syntax with a double option name, -f as well as --ini-file is supposed
> to work,
> but it would be easy enough to supply -f or --ini-file as an alternative.
> (Although the latter might be a bit confusing, as there already is an
> option -ini,
> short for -settingsFile, which not only reads the file like @ does, but
> then
> automatically also redirects saving of user settings to it. So we really
> have three
> kind of options now: {@, -opt, -at} which only read settings,
> {-settingsFile, -ini}
> which read the file, and makes it the place for saving if it existed,
> and -saveSettingsFile, which only makes it the place for saving (even if it
> doesn't exist, without checking if the name would be valid).

and this is why I think there is plenty of room for improvement. At the
moment we have @, -at, -opt, -f, --ini-file, -settingFiles,
-saveSettingsFile where IMO w really only need one option (or two if you
want to include a long version). A nice pref-editor would give you a
"save as" button, so that you can combine different setting files or
save any changes as a new file (with the old file preselected). If the
user wants to autosave the settings then the last setting file in the
commandline is used (if user writeable).

cheers
        ARUN