Originally, clap carried a lifetime parameter. When moving away from
that, we took the approach that dynamically generated strings are always
supported and `&'static str` was just an optimization.
The problem is the code size increase from this is dramatic. So we're
taking the opposite approach and making dynamic formatting opt-in under
the `string` feature flag. When deciding on an implementation, I
favored the faster one rather than the one with smaller code size since
small code size can be gotten through other means.
Before: 567.2 KiB, 15.975 µs
After: 541.1 KiB, 9.7855 µs
With `string`: 576.6 KiB, 13.016 µs
The overall hope is to allow a `&'static str`-only version of clap, so
we need to move off of `Str` where dynamic strings are required. We
need it here for subcommands due to external subcommands.
This had minimal impact on code size (567.2 to 567.5 KiB)
This makes us accept `str` and not do any allocations at the cost of
panicing if unsupported which I think fits our overall story in trying
to catch development-time errors.
Originally, I saw the ideal as the parent command being isolated from
`#[clap(flatte)]` especially after all of the doc comment
leakage issues. We scaled that back to just `next_help_heading` because
of the issues with settling on a policy and maintenance to cover
everything. When doing `next_display_order`, we decided it would mess
things up too much to isolate it.
With #1807, we instead have been moving towards setting
`#[command(next_help_heading)]` anywhere, we just need to finish working
out how it should work.
Just having `--help` or `--version` can make us get invalid args instead
of invalid subcommands. It doesn't make sense to do this unless
positionals are used. Even then it might not make sense but this is at
least a step in the right direction.
Unsure how I feel about this being backported to clap 3. It most likely
would be fine?
This was noticed while looking into #4218
Since the `name` is changed to be the package name, we can't use it as
(1) its not as predictable and (2) it can lead to conflicts if a
`Parser` is flattened into a `Parser`
This was ported over from the usage parser which modeled after docopt.
We just never got around to implementing the rest of the syntax.
However, when considering this as a standalone feature, an
`arg!(--flag <value>)`, outside of other context, should be optional.
This is how the help would display it.
Fixes#4206
