1130 tweaks
Stephen Weeks
MLton@sourcelight.com
Wed, 3 Jan 2001 09:21:43 -0800 (PST)
> The file doc/examples/ffi/ffi should not be included in the source RPM (I
> think).
Right. Fixed.
> Yikes: the usage messsage from mlton is huge (sad, but not horrible), but
> It is 112 columns wide (ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE).
> It is printed with trailing space characters (also HORRIBLE).
> These REALLY REALLY have to be fixed. I would think that the table function
> shouldn't put trailing white space, but it depends on where else you use it.
> Alternatively, in the List.foreach in ! usageRef you could trim trailing
> blanks before adding a newline at the end. This fixes the trailing white
> space, but not the length of the comments. The length also REALLY must be
> fixed. Either go for multiple lines or shorten things. I would argue that
> shorter messages are better since they are just supposed to remind you if you
> kind-of already knew what was going on. If you don't, the man page is the
> place to go. Just change the indentation of the whole list to 4 spaces and
> then be brutal on truncating the messages.
I agree completely. I vote for shortening.
Matthew, part of the width problem is the "Experimental" -native flags. I see
three possibilities for such flags in the release.
* Remove them from the message.
* Keep them in the message, but remove the "Experimental" label (and probably
the default as well for space reasons)
* Have two different usage messages, one for the real switches and one for the
experimental switches.
Any thoughts? My vote is for the second, just because the programming's a bit
simpler and the line between experimental or not is kind of fuzzy anyway.