Before we introduced actions, it required specific setups to engage with
claps version and help printing. With actions making that more
explicit, we don't get as much benefit from our multiple, obscure, ways
of users customizing help
Before
- Modify existing help or version with `mut_arg` which would
automatically be pushed down the command tree like `global(true)`
- Create an new help or version and have it treated as if it was the
built-in on (I think)
- Use the same flags as built-in and have the built-in flags
automatically disabled
- Users could explicitly disable the built-in functionality and do what
they want
Now
- `mut_arg` no longer works as we define help and version flags at the
end
- If someone defines a flag that overlaps with the built-ins by id,
long, or short, a debug assert will tell them to explicitly disable
the built-in
- Any customization has to be done by a user providing their own. To
propagate through the command tree, they need to set `global(true)`.
Benefits
- Hopefully, this makes it less confusing on how to override help
behavior. Someone creates an arg and we then tell them how to disable
the built-in
- This greatly simplifies the arg handling by pushing more
responsibility onto the developer in what are hopefully just corner
cases
- This removes about 1Kb from .text
Fixes#3405Fixes#4033
multiple_values is now just book keeping for the builder, instead people
should look to actions and `num_args`.
The meaning for it was a little weird anyways.
This reduces ambiguity in how the different "multiple" parts of the API
interact and lowrs the amount of API surface area users have to dig
through to use clap.
For now, this is only a matter of cleaning up the public API. Cleaning
up the implementation is the next step.
The main goal is to reduce the risk of people developing on the wrong
release, assuming they are using something like starship to raise the
visibility of the crate version.
This is a step towards #3309. We want to make longs and long aliases
more consistent in how they handle leading dashes. There is more
flexibility offered in not stripping and it matches the v3 short
behavior of only taking the non-dash form. This starts the process by
disallowing it completely so people will catch problems with it and
remove their existing leading dashes. In a subsequent breaking release
we can remove the debug assert and allow triple-leading dashes.
This is a part of #2717
Some settings didn't get getters because
- They are transient parse settings (e.g. ignore errors)
- They get propagated to args and should be checked there
`is_allow_hyphen_values_set` is a curious case. In some cases, we only
check the app and not an arg. This seems suspicious.
`clap_generate` originally intended to be "generate anything". With
`fig`, we already broke one part out. With #3174's man support, we are
also looking at keeping it separate:
- More freedom to iterate on the API
- Uniqueness (and potential weight) of its dependencies
- man generation is normally more for distribution while completions are
a mix of being distributed with the app or the app generating the
completions (which will be exacerbated if we move most completion
parsing logic to be in Rust)
So `clap_generate` is having a lot more limited of a role than the
original name conveys. I worry the generic name will be a hindrance to
people discovering and using it (yes, documentation can help but there
are limits).
I hesitated because we are on the verge of releasing 3.0. However, doing
it even later will be even more disruptive because more people will be
using it (crates.io lists ~70 people using `clap_generate`).
To ease things, we are still releasing `clap_generate` as a wrapper
around `clap_complete`.
